Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Which means extra maintenance work to check for every piece of software that anyone uses whether it uses another library that it needs to be recompiled against and, if it fails, how to use the new version.

If there are automatic updates, at least it either works and is more secure, or it breaks automatically and unsafe software stops working.

Whether you prefer people to use MSIE6 because "it just works" or whether you prefer old sites that only worked with MSIE6 to break because it's no longer maintained, that's the trade-off you have to choose between.

As a security person, I'm obviously biased, I can only advise what I see from a professional perspective. All I was saying above is that automatic updates being considered a security risk is on the same scale of odds as considering vaccines dangerous -- in regular cases, that is: of course the advice is different if you're a special (sensitive) organisation or a special (immunocompromised) person.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: