We Need Software Updates Forever

Re:We Need Software Updates Forever by KronisLV on Thursday September 23, 2021 @03:16AM (#28626125)

In that case, we're probably (hopefully) talking about air gapped environments, like medical devices that aren't networked or internal corporate networks with very particular host access rules.

In those cases, you might truly want no updates of any kind, with which i agree - updates should always be compatible with the "opt out" approach, or even do "opt in" (like Debian has an unattended upgrades package, for example: https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades).

That said, due to the world that we live in, it's risky to forgo any sorts of security updates, especially in the context of networked devices and systems!

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Re:We Need Software Updates Forever by bryanrasmussen on Thursday September 23, 2021 @03:58AM (#28626426)

I mean I was thinking more about the thing were WMF files used to allow you to run scripts inside the files which created security issues https://www.computerworld.com/article/2826084/what-you-need-... - lots of functionality that is enabled to make things easier for applications to do stuff is fundamentally insecure, so pushing a solution to fix the security issue will sometimes lead to remove functionality from the application that the user has to accept.

So the premise that we could remove security issues but not touch functionality seems utopian.

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