This has became the new normal it seems. Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work (or to start it in the middle of the night and not switch it back off).

This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"

I’ve had it up to here with pushy updates. Tragedy of the commons: every app thinks it’s important enough to update several times per week.

On any given day, at least one of Windows, Firefox, VSCode, or myriad other less important apps wants to update before it runs. Talk about pessimising app start times! App start time is now the time to download and reinstall!

Windows FCU silently borked 6 of my machines by steamrolling drivers I had carefully selected for stability and performance. Broke GPU and Wifi on 5 of those, and it took me half a day to figure out what changed. On my main dev machine, Windows Update got into an infinite loop of churning the disk 100% and never finishing. Every fix I tried did nothing, until finally I disabled all WU services.

So in resignation, I did install Ubuntu. And was quickly reminded why I don’t use it. Ironically, the productivity-killer there is also about updates: for any app I need to run properly, I have to update its whole lineage of dependencies, often manually, and work out which versions it likes.

So I’m reluctantly back to Windows. I’ve just changed all the update settings I can find to ask me or just leave me alone and let me get a little work done.

> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work

To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this.

I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it. For pro users, shouldn't be rebooting, for most users, they shouldn't notice.

Applications shouldn't need to care, because the computer should not ever be rebooted for the vast majority of security updates --- the ones that everyone will be fine with (even those who otherwise hate upgrading), the ones that fix things like buffer overflows, the ones that actually matter to security.

It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.

If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923

drpm files on Fedora 25+ spring to mind, along with jigdo and zsync (Debian, Ubuntu - for full isos). I'm sure they will get there, but then perhaps different installs have a different set of files that need to be replaced?

> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work

This is something I've found fault with in Windows, and was greatly disappointed to see happen in Sierra.

I had been getting the High Sierra update reminder notification once a day for several days and normally just clicked "Remind me tomorrow" (since there's no option for "Don't remind me"). One day after having it pop up, I instead clicked "Try in an hour".

I expected this to ask me again in an hour, at which point I would choose whether or not to proceed with the update. Instead, while my MacBook was asleep with work open, it went ahead and updated the OS without my consent.

I don't (think) I lost any work, as I typically save things and Vim didn't leave any swp files. But the experience was disconcerting and bitterly reminiscent of Windows...

Do for their own good? I see this as for the collective good, as most of the people hurt by unpatched software are NOT microsoft but people, small businesses, and the victims of the resulting botnets.

Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.

The decision should ultimately be up to the user.

This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.

I mean, I’d rather just not have internet connected devices at all. But the internet is a commons, and people who don’t patch ruin it for everyone.

But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.

The issue with having an off switch is that non-tech-savvy people will blindly follow some instructions to disable it and will get caught by a major security vuln.

Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.

Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.

A good reminder that if a software company is given enough trust to auto update, keeping that trust us important. Seems the big boys have been breaching that trust a lot lately.

This is true. But i’m ok with stupidity hurting individuals—at least in terms of compromise—i’m less ok with default settings being potentially insecure one day.

I don't like the pattern Apple is using there. But comparing it with Microsoft?!?

Microsoft was a lot more aggressive and shady, and used a bunch of evil UI patterns, like installing it by clicking "Cancel" button. Or displaying a second start button that opens the shady installer instead of the start menu. macOS auto downloading is not right, but it is whole level below that.

If you look at OS charts like on Steam, 64% still on Win7, many reverted back, because Win10 (29%) is shit and full of dark patterns, and Win7 is the new XP. In the last few months the install base of Win7 increased whereas Win10 decreased (I was one of them). http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc and https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-7-user-base-on-steam-con...

No, it’s the same really. Automatically downloading I’ve 5GB of data in the background without permission is some incredibly shady shit. There are people in Australia with data plans that this would literally still cost hundreds of dollars.

I often use my laptop with my mobile hotspot when I'm outside the house, and 5GB of data would cost me $50. Which is more than Apple used to charge to buy a MacOS X install DVD. Most months I only need $5 - $10 of mobile data.

(Side note: I had no idea you can still buy Snow Leopard DVDs from Apple! Costs $30.99 including shipping:)

https://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-...

Gosh, I miss Snow Leopard now. The best OS Apple ever did, IMO. Super stable and totally about "getting shit done." In the years I was running it, I don't ever remember my system crashing.

The difference is that the App Store Control Panel on the Mac allows the user to make the decision that updates should or should not be downloaded in advance of the decision to install the update.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207251

With the Windows 10 update, Microsoft was actively using dark patterns to circumvent their user's wishes.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegat...

Downloading in the background is not the same as installing without warning. Yes, Apple should make the install notification more clear to prevent users from clicking blindly. That’s not the same as surreptitiously tricking users (it is possible to decline the update on macOS). These are separate griefs.

I live in Spain and I have a data-limited connection as well. I use Little Snitch to stop unwanted background downloads.

There is an option to disable the automatic downloads in System Preferences -> App Store.

“For the greater good” seem to be the answer for these aggressive moves from tech companies.

I beg to differ. Microsoft used underhand tactics to force Windows 10 on users, where at one point closing the upgrade prompt window by clicking the X at the top-right was taken as permission to install. The difference between Windows 8.1 and 10 was marked, particularly because when Windows 10 was first released it was extremely buggy, and the in-place installation broke swathes of drivers, programs and lost settings. (At least, this was my experience as the person called to fix such problems).

>Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegat...

Would you please not be so rude with other users? We're trying to have a discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html