OK, thats enough with the freakin’ updates
August 9th, 2006 by Atomictumor
Firefox has updated itself today, again, for the 4th time this month. Each time, I end up having to reboot my computer because some mystery process doesn’t want firefox to update causing an eternal cycle of “Failed to update, OH GOD” errors segueing into another install attempt, and back again. Good stuff.
Wordpress did it too. I was sailing fine on 1.5 until the great Magnethands incident, and I took the opportunity to bump up to 2.0. 2.0.1 and .2 came out without me noticing, until a friend needed help with 2.0.2. It appears that the text editor in 2.0.2 didn’t like working properly, and was a common problem. Of course, Wordpress support has been maligned a bit as of late, but since then there have been two additional updates, one of which I received an email saying “YOU MUST UPDATE OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN”.
So I did, and no problems yet. However, Firefox today got me to thinkin.
It appears that the open source software crowd is running into the same problem that used to be its big trump card over Microsoft and its closed source crowd, in that the software WORKS without patching. Firefox, Wordpress, and plenty others end up having some vulnerability found, prompting an immediate patch, which opens another one, perpetuating an endless cycle of updates for something that probably wouldn’t have been a problem left unpublicized to begin with. Once the patch comes out, the script kiddies start exploiting it
What to do? Linux? Mac?
August 9th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Yeah, I was on the comp a little while ago and all of a sudden there’s an update. It doesn’t ask me if I wanna, it just does it. Only takes a second, but damnit, I want to be in charge of my own computer.
August 9th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
well, I’ve turned it off. But the problem is, it turns itself back on eventually, which is really pretty much just malware in my eyes. Sucks. And I like Firefox.
August 9th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
“…perpetuating an endless cycle of updates for something that probably wouldn’t have been a problem left unpublicized to begin with.”
Security through obscurity does not work.
It’s funny, because I think the opposite is true: Microsoft sucks because they WILL sit on an exploit for months, whereas Firefox developers will patch it immediately.
The patches were distracting for a few days, but they’ve stopped and all is well now.
August 9th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Yeah, theres no excuse for sitting on a known exploit, but a halfassed patch is damn near as bad, man.
August 9th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
I didn’t look at the details, but I thought that these patches were all for different things, and it was just coincidental that they were coming so close together. Maybe I should actually read what changed before going around typing that, though…