I am very reticent to update some embedded devices because not only to I risk losing functionality, losing my preferred UI, etc, but the update may also make irreversible changes to my hardware. Even if I am able to wrest control away from the manufacturer (e.g. "jailbreak" the device) I may not be able to revert to a prior version because the hardware identifies itself as being physically unable to run the old software.

coughs in Nintendo Switch

I update machines less quickly than I used to: Migration Assistant is finicky and has cost me at least a day, if not more, of various kinds of work in the past.

Slack recently moved the profile settings from the left of the screen to the right.

It hasn’t been replaced by anything on the left.

Someone just decided to move it, they probably have some pseudo science about “design weight balance” to justify moving it.

Really it’s change for change’s sake.

In order to fix their issue with the new version, they worked out how to roll-back by one version and disable future updates.

Inevitably some users will complain about changes in every new update while others complain about a lack of eagerly awaited new features and bug fixes. You cannot make everyone happy :/

I'm sympathetic to the idea that workflow/ui changes should be explicit updates (or on beta opt-ins) with security/crash fixes being automatic. This model makes the most sense for professional tools that people make a living from (e.g. CAD). To be sustainable, software with multiple supported major versions will cost more.

The state of play in 2020 however is that operating systems and browsers 100% need automatic updates for security issues. The reason we have them is because of all the bad things that happened when we didn't.

There should then be a very small switch hidden somewhere deep in the system where people like you who know what they are doing can turn them off. For the people who are using the software to say, run the electrical grid and a) care more about stability than security and b) pay people to write scathing reports about all the patches they're not installing.

IMHO there is a sticky middle ground with respect to office suites and email clients where the software is widespread enough that bugs are wormable.

Updates as a whole are inter-twingled with the developer's support and release model, how they a/b test and general maturity in terms of managing change. I feel like we're often complaining about different aspects of this when we talk about "updates".

I have had orders of magnitude more problem with updates than with malware/viruses/hackers.

The thing is with malware/viruses/hackers sooner or later something will get through any defences, so you need robust recovery system anyway.

And most updates that brake systems are not even security updates. I wouldn't mind automated security updates, but many many many maybe most vendors pile whatever happens to compile to their updates so that they customers can test it for them.

Firefox on mobile just fucked us in the ass (extension we developed for client doesn't work anymore and we can't fix it. And since we have support contract we will probably have to eat the cost of whatever alternative we have to build.).

Maybe that's precisely because the updates are preventing you from being owned?

Until you get hit by this....

https://www.giac.org/paper/gcih/201/microsoft-iis-superfluou...

It was the first widespread IIS vulnerability that almost hit me. The tl;dr version: All you had to do was encode a shell command in the url bar if the site was running IIS and it would execute it on the server.

Updates its 3,4 times per year. Like I said order of magnitude difference

> should be incremental and security or bug fixes only

There's a big difference between that and, for example, constantly pushing UI changes that nobody asked for and for no other reason than that some designer somewhere decided that "A/B testing" would look good on their resumé.

For desktop software, most seem to, sadly, be self updating or a website.

For example, youtube now has a miniplayer when playing a playlist on desktop. I find that "feature" to be absolutely atrocious and would rather do without it. But due to it being a website they changed it to make it impossible to turn it off.

[1] Whatsapp

Altough, the reddit redesign sucks on mobile too.

The problem here is the hostile relationship from the companies to their customers.

And even if they say security they usually bundle it with other changes, along with not even saying what kind of security change.

Give me a vulnerability tracker and what has been fixed, and I'll actually update your app.

For me, the "added security" is just not worth it MOST of the time. Partially due to actually only installing apps that don't even have the capability to do much/any damage, due to it only having permission to access parts I don't deem dangerous.

We're talking about phone apps. 99% of the time this just isn't the case and the remaining 1% is for issues so widely broadcast you would absolutely know.

For example:

> should be incremental and security or bug fixes only

That means maintaining multiple releases of the app, and porting fixes between those versions, while also maintaining data migration logic when fixes affect data formats. I've maintained an enterprise software suite before where we did it like that, and it added a double digit percentage to the cost of development. You also get drawn into a discussion of what exactly constitutes a fix. Some users consider a missing feature a bug, sometimes they're right.

> should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default

I hope you've maintained a very clean separation between view an controller layers, because otherwise you'll have duplicate business logic and tons of bugs. Again, been there, done that, was not a happy camper.

> must allow a revert to the previous situation

So, maintaining and testing data migration algorithms in both directions then?

> should never change the format of data already stored on the system

Multiple independent read and write paths? How many combinations of UI and data logic do you get? A combinatorial explosion can cause this to become effectively untestable.

Granted, some developers are bad, and abuse automatic updates. I swore off Oracle Java after a security update installed malware on my system (called Norton Antivirus). But most developers are not like that. They mean well, they're doing the best they can given their limited resources.

As far as file formats go, how often do you need to change these, anyway? I'm fascinated with most of the mainstream file formats (except mp3, mp3 sucks) — they're built with extreme extensibility in mind, and you have to try really hard to make something incompatible with the rest of the world. So, then, what stops you from designing your own file formats to be extensible? You add a new feature, you add a new section to your file. The user downgrades, and the old version skips over that section because it doesn't know about it. It's easy.

And besides, I've seen a lot of software that's able to save files that are 100% compatible with older versions of itself if that's what the user asks for. Microsoft Office is one example.

For free-as-in-beer software? You get what you pay for.

Supporting a full matrix of (security release) * (feature release) combinations isn't cheap.

Having paid for something isn't a magical spell that wards this away. Having sunk costs makes it less likely that the users will migrate away after unpleasant, user-hostile changes, not more. Having a budget also allows for enough PR to bury the complaints.

Many many times Windows updates download, try to install, and fail with an "unknown reason" and a useless error code. I disabled them for just this reason. It's completely pointless.

Here is a description of updates from June which caused me significant trouble: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/04/06/windows-10-update-k... https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/03/17/windows-10-kb455176... (other patch)

From the first article: "Another user also told us that the KB4541335 update crashes the system and later causes 100% disk/CPU usage."

That is pretty much what happened to me, especially the hard drive grinding. Also discovering that I couldn't use F8 to boot to safe mode any more. I discovered I had to wait a very long time to get to the login screen all the time with the HDD grinding and then shift click something to get the menus to be able to do a system restore without loading a user profile.

Note to anyone using Windows, always have a Windows PE environment ready to boot to, even if you are a home user, it may save a lot of trouble.

That will never happen as long as software continues to be regarded as a "cost center"

That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users

That will never happen as long as evangelists keep pushing this doctrine that more updates, more features, more whatever, is better

I don't think that's actual true. As far as I know the only legal obligation a company has is to conduct lawful business.

Neither customers nor employees can do that

In general, shareholder recourse is limited to electing a new board that will do what those shareholders want. The exceptions are cases where the actions of the corporation or board are discriminatory to some shareholders, or where there is fraud or self-dealing by insiders (e.g., shareholder derivative suits).

> They can also arbitrarily shuffle senior management as they see fit

Not directly. Shareholders elect the board, which then chooses the managers (CEO, etc.) who actually run the company. Shareholders usually only elect board members once per year at the annual meeting. So it’s not arbitrary.

> Neither customers nor employees can do that

This is true. Customers and employees don’t direct the corporation the same ways that the owners (shareholders) do. However, customers can boycott and employees can strike. Those can be effective ways to influence the direction of a corporation. Also, customers can sue for other things (e.g., fraud or malpractice), as can employees (e.g., employment discrimination). And any injured third party can sue the corporation.

> That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to

The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.

> That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users

The user can simply stop using the software if the developer doesn't respect their time (happiness is a completely subjective property dependant on the individual).

So I say this will never happen while people won't actively move for alternatives and put up with crappy products.

I made the effort to stop using products from large companies that don't respect my privacy and don't respect freedom of speech of their users. So whenever possible I don't use any products from the large tech companies.

If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.

And the companies which shell out the big bucks to keep terrible software products shambling along for year after year don't really do it because they hate they staff and want to screw up their happiness and productivity, although it can often seem like that. They do it because either there isn't anything else which does the thing they need to keep doing their business, or becuse they have so much past history and experience of using that product that it would be ridiculously expensive and dangerous to change or because they believe that the pain of supporting fifty different users using thirty different incompatible pieces of software to do the same job is worse than the pain of having all those users screwed up at the same time by an upgrade that goes bad.

None of which are unreasonable positions to take and all of which push the responsibility for improving the situtaion back to where it belongs: the writers and suppliers of the upgrade. Upgrades should adopt a hippocratic principle: the change that YOU make to the system which I have paid for and which I rely on to do my job should not suddenly impossible costs or make it impossible me to use it to do something that I was doing yesterday.

And that, in turn, is not going to happen, unless and until customers (both commercial and private) have the right to compensation for lost time and earning imposed by changes which benefit nobody except the software vendor.

Also the same rule still applies. If I had to use some terrible software everyday I would leave a job if it was that bad. I had to develop on a terrible CMS, once I realised it was never going to change, I looked for another job.

I think it is pretty obvious that if companies are abusing their position to that extent an appropriate governing body should step in. However there are going to be issues that won't fall under such a remit.

Also just because the government/regulator is failing to step in, doesn't mean you can't be doing something yourself. I was getting very frustrated with Google and its products. So I decided to stop using them whenever possible.

As for moving away from industry giants, this works. Firefox (back in the early 2000s) chipped away at IE's monopoly and broke the stagnation.

Yeah, much like how I get a choice to not use Jira at work, or to not use Facebook Messenger or not use LinkedIn right? The argument that everything ultimately comes down to individual user choice ignore so many externalities that it’s borderline unrealistic.

Network effects are strong. Too strong.

Most people will find work through indeed linkedin may give you a 5% boost. If you say you don't have a resume..

Why would you need facebook messenger installed when you want fb events. Just login to the web version click events.

For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.

Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.

I have a very light profile up.

I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.

People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.

I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.

Having the most important communications with other people and companies, and the login verification all in the hands of one company which could shaft your access in all sorts of ways (screw up, removing service, ban) is just terrible in the long term. And if someone is using their ISPs email address, that is something that would keep them signed to that ISP even though another may offer a service much better for them.

Anyway, anyone migrated away from their email provider after a long time signed up and could answer some of the questions in the first paragraph? Thanks.

You just create another email and register all your new accounts with it. Whenever you get any old notifications to your old email you recofigure them to your new email account, one by one. After about a year you will be practically free. You do not have to delete your Gmail account, you can just forward all its emails.

A lack of both of these would not inconvenience me in any way personally and I find the claim that going without them being a lot of work questionable. Maybe I've just been lucky in who I work for/with?

If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.

You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need. I just decided I wasn't going to use them anymore and stop making excuses for having to deal with companies that couldn't give a fuck about me.

Sounds like acquaintances. You ought to have a bunch of those, they are great to have, very valuable, and lots of fun. All of my close friendships started out as acquaintances. I got my current appartment via an acquaintance – quite nice and below market price. My current job, my partner of many years, lots of great ideas and input, lots of useful advice ... having acquaintances is great. They won't follow you to the end of the world though – they're not that invested in you, by definition, that's why you can have many of them.

> If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.

If you insist everyone accomodate your communication preferences, but will not accomodate their communication preferences at all, maybe you weren't worth bothering with in the first place. If you trade them for a little bit of moral high ground that easily, that's not exactly great friendship either. If it's just Facebook, but Telegram is fine – I personally could work with that. Some people with old phones can't have all the messengers – might be a problem for them. No Whatsapp? Party planning just got a lot more annoying, because someone will have to play relay for you. Just taking phone calls, nothing else? The 20th century is long past and I'm glad for it, just get some kind of messenger like literally everyone else, even my parents. We still frequently escalate to phone calls, because it's easier for them – but we try to meet each other midway.

> You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need.

Or maybe there are legitimate needs that these apps and platforms fulfill, like making connecting with people and all sorts of communication really, really easy and frictionless, and for them that's worth the – so far – largely theoretical price we all pay; that's my personal stance in this. Maybe the benefits of a one-person-boycott aren't that compelling – it's not going to make a difference at all, unless everyone does so, but they don't, an when they do, they'll all flock to LibreOpenFree Network, so you won't even have to give up your contacts. A one-person boycott isn't going to keep Facebook from assembling a detailed shadow profile on you, unless you go to really great lengths that very, very few people are capable of, and then they still learn what your contacts leak about you.

If you're fine without social media, you got your social circle that agrees with you and sticks to phone calls, or maybe you're fine without lots of people in your life – great for you, you do you. But telling others who are not in that situation in what I read as quite a condescending tone that their social needs are just excuses, odd things they claim they need, that feels rude and not helpful at all.

No. They were drunks (I was becoming one myself). I told you in the sentence before that once I didn't come to the pub they weren't interested in spending any time with me. That what addicts are like.

This really isn't difficult stuff to understand. The acquaintance relationship only existed because of substance abuse basically. There is no friendship of shared interest outside of that.

I was thinking about writing a rebuttal to everything else you said. But there really isn't much point because you can't even understand this part of social interaction.

All my real friends btw, keep in touch via email, text etc. As for me demanding I use a communication medium, everyone has a cell phone with SMS and everyone has an email address. If people can't be bothered to do that ...

The problem is that those that do care also have to suffer. After a certain point of critical mass, when it comes to tech, oftentimes you can't just take your business elsewhere any more.

If people really cared (as much as they claim) you will make alternatives work for you.

If you've an iOS app and you've run afoul of the app store, you can't take those iOS users with you without asking them to switch to another platform or asking them to use a web app instead (both of which are forbidden, I think)

If you're on gmail and your account gets suspended, you can't set up a magical redirect that sends all your mail to another address. Can you even use Google Takeout?

These are all extremely popular platforms with strong lock-in effects through various circumstances.

In too many cases, the switching costs are so high as to be destructive. Yes you can technically switch but the price is dire. That doesn't count in my book.

Not sure why using google as your main email makes sense with so many others offering email.

You can take the iOS customer off of iOS to a different platform through ingame awareness.. one you control

You should diversify your social media presence then and let your followers know "look if I am not here one day this is my website or you can find me here".

> If you've an iOS app and you've run afoul of the app store, you can't take those iOS users with you without asking them to switch to another platform or asking them to use a web app instead (both of which are forbidden, I think)

This is probably the only valid scenario presented due to there being only two players realistically in the mobile phone space.

> If you're on gmail and your account gets suspended, you can't set up a magical redirect that sends all your mail to another address. Can you even use Google Takeout?

This actually happened to a friend of mine (he got locked out of his account). He ended up learning from the experience and owns his own domain and uses one of the other email providers.

The government might fix these issues in another 10 years ... maybe? You are actually validating my point about people being ignorant of the risks of using services that can suspend you account for any reason at any time. Don't use them, or if you must then mitigate any potential fallout from losing access to that service.

People that have been being censored by large tech companies have already started doing this.

> In too many cases, the switching costs are so high as to be destructive. Yes you can technically switch but the price is dire. That doesn't count in my book.

As we are arbitrarily deciding what counts, I don't think the social media accounts or the gmail issue is a big deal.

They are easily mitigated against as long as you aren't ignorant. Being a smart consumer, smart user will protect you much better than anything else. Which proves my point.

I love to trot out the "don't be stupid" argument too, and it never works. If "don't be stupid" was at all an effective mantra, tech would look a whole lot different. But people being stupid is what sustains these practices, and it is what provides the lock-in effect that I'm describing. Plus, someone will argue that it discriminates against unintelligent or mentally handicapped folks (which it does), or underprivileged folks and minorities (which is debatable). And then someone else will argue that people should be able to drive their car without having to know how to repair them (that's what services are for!) or that their specific choice in make/model/whatever shouldn't have a future tragic effect on their life. And those arguments are supported by law and government agencies backing them up.

Yes I appreciate there are edge cases such as the mentally handicapped. However realistic I am talking about the majority of the population which are capable of looking after themselves.

Again this much like another reply I received. You are making it an all or nothing scenario.

Realistically it will be a combination of regulation and people starting to get wise to what these companies are doing. At the moment the regulators don’t have the power or aren’t up to speed. So instead of waiting for the shit to hit the fan you can protect yourself and start mitigating risk.

I really don’t like this attitude of people that you cannot try to protect yourself.

Also Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Remember that "above average" intelligence excludes 50% of the population. So unless you're scheming on ways to raise the tide for all boats, give up.

There are plenty of enablers out there, but there are also plenty of jaded souls who do not see this as a war that they can win.

Maybe there will be a day when the majority of the population will be more conscious of their lifestyle choices (and that technology choices deserve time and effort just like your dietary choices).

In any event you can slowly move away from using a companies products. It isn't a all or nothing proposition.

Dude, if you're a professional graphic designer, you're using an Adobe workflow. The amount of friction that you would encounter in your daily work for any other choice is simply too high.

You can't have the cake and eat it too.

This never happens. No software is ever run on your computer without your permission unless you install it (or willingly buy the computer with that software pre-installed). If you install software that auto-updates, you have it coming.