41–50 of 62 posts
This reminds me of a friend who missed a dinner date because his Tesla update took way longer than usual.
Holy shit, that's a real thing and not just a meme? They don't let you cancel the update because you need your car to get you from point A to point B? That's, uhhh, really bad.
I get a similar thing teaching a coding club. I'm not sure how the machines are set up, as I have an aversion to Windows from my time as an NT 'certified professional', but at least one machine will spend 10 minutes 'updating' during any class. No doubt you can turn this off or set update time windows or whatever, but I'm not the admin for these machines. At least the updates generally work. For my kids' machines at…
""For my kids' machines at home, anytime they boot windows, it will do an update, and a good percentage of the time, the update will fail, and brick the machine, requiring a complete re-install." My wife and kids all use and have used 2nd hand company Windows 10 laptops. Since one of my roles by day is being a system administrator, i took quite some time to setup Windows 10 as they and i like it, being very very thor…
Perhaps that's the key. I don't have time for that, linux just works, though of course some apps aren't available at all on linux, hence the windows boots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Updates on shutdown make sense in some of my machines but are awful in the laptop I use to teach classes. When I finish a class, what I want is to leave to do something else elsewhere (often another class in a different room). I know I could probably suspend or something, but I never do that because it used to be a lottery on Windows whether your machine would actually unsuspend or you would need to fight it pressing…
That sounds like a problem from twenty years ago.
Automatic updates are terrible and the first thing I do when I get a new device or reinstall an OS is try to figure out how to disable them. Sadly, I am losing this battle and more and more stuff insists on updating behind my back, without me commanding them to update. This should be unacceptable. When I buy something I should be in full control of what it’s doing, not the manufacturer. I dont care if the software is…
But your neighbour plugged into a life-support machine at the local hospital does, because your machine could be used as a staging point for further attacks.
When we built an "interconnected world" we created interconnected responsibility.
That said, I agree with you that products that assume permission to connect to the internet and update when they feel like it are a menace. They result from disgraceful, lazy, inept software engineering and allow sloppy manufacturers to unload responsibility on to users.
That is unacceptable and it is going to change in Europe with a slew of legislation coming soon.
But that law may actually make things worse because it misunderstands the locus of responsibility and trust models.
Centralising trust in automatic updates with a manufacturer makes security much worse in many regards. Solarwinds is nothing compared to what is coming when billions of connected devices can be owned and turned into a botnet in s single exploit.
Your right to control your device is not to be championed solely because of your property rights, but perhaps ironically, because that is the better security model as the lesser of two evils.
Please don't say "I don't care about CVE-1234567", because at the end of the day, you're the only one whose 'care' actually matters. The manufacturer doesn't care and cannot really be trusted.
Automatic updates are terrible and the first thing I do when I get a new device or reinstall an OS is try to figure out how to disable them. Sadly, I am losing this battle and more and more stuff insists on updating behind my back, without me commanding them to update. This should be unacceptable. When I buy something I should be in full control of what it’s doing, not the manufacturer. I dont care if the software is…
> I dont care if the software is vulnerable to CVE-1234567 But your neighbour plugged into a life-support machine at the local hospital does, because your machine could be used as a staging point for further attacks. When we built an "interconnected world" we created interconnected responsibility. That said, I agree with you that products that assume permission to connect to the internet and update when they feel lik…
Software trying to update when it is started is such a common pattern, despite almost always going against user intent. When I start software, that's because I want to use it. It's pretty high on the list of times I don't want it to become temporarily unusable while it updates itself. Doing the same with vehicle firmware is a sad but predictable state of things.
Zoom asks if you want to update after a call, which seems the best time for it to me.
Software trying to update when it is started is such a common pattern, despite almost always going against user intent. When I start software, that's because I want to use it. It's pretty high on the list of times I don't want it to become temporarily unusable while it updates itself. Doing the same with vehicle firmware is a sad but predictable state of things.
Zoom asks if you want to update after a call, which seems the best time for it to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of several devices I own that never do this. 1) My LG webOS TV. Somehow it always does its thing in the dark. OS and application updates have never been visible to me. 2) My car. Even though it can update over wifi, and by other means, it never tries to do it unbidden. You have to invoke its maintenance mode, at the time of your own choosing, if ever. 3) Google/Nest Wifi, OnHub, et cetera. Always up-to-da…
You probably turn your TV and Nest on less than once per year. It's much easier for always on devices to update when they're not in use than an item like a scooter, which when it's off, it's actually off. That said, I don't know why you would ever connect a transportation device to the internet. All of my vehicles are too old to connect to the internet, but when I finally have to replace them, the first thing I'll do…
Software trying to update when it is started is such a common pattern, despite almost always going against user intent. When I start software, that's because I want to use it. It's pretty high on the list of times I don't want it to become temporarily unusable while it updates itself. Doing the same with vehicle firmware is a sad but predictable state of things.
I used Windows 10 for the first time in years this weekend to play games While playing , Windows would switch from the game to a stupid "Restart your computer now or in 1 hour?" modal - with no option to get it to permanently go away. And it kept popping up every hour. Infuriating. See screenshot here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/8kismw/wtf_micro...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoom asks if you want to update after a call, which seems the best time for it to me.
Is that true? Maybe it's different on Mac OS, but for me (on a Mac), Zoom wants to update every time I open it, and often fails. It's very annoying.
Maybe it works as intended if you use it daily, but as someone who only occasionally uses Zoom for external calls I'm in the habit of always opening it a couple minutes early to have time for software updates