by Charles Miller

Not long ago I had an annoying experience when using my laptop away from home. When I started my email client to send a message, the program said "Thunderbird is installing updates" after which all of my accounts, emails, contacts, and customization were gone. That required me to make a trip home to restore yesterday's backup, then all was soon okay. The worrisome thing about this incident is that the program has an option in its settings to choose "Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them" so that the program was not supposed to not update until I approved.

Later I was to learn that my emails and contacts would not have been lost and could have been recovered even if I had not had a backup. But more annoying was I learned that the program I had trusted through a hundred versions over two decades had an internal updater that could override or reset my user preferences after detecting a new version. The software maker had sneaked in a backdoor through which it could gavage a software update, my preferences be damned.

Sadly, this is the reality of modern software. Microsoft's Windows receives regular updates that cannot be refused; they can be postponed a few days but after that you are getting them like it or not. Apple's MacOS has settings that allegedly let the user accept or reject updates, but it is well documented that even with updates turned off, the computer may still occasionally ignore user wishes then download and install updates. Likewise, this scenario also applies to smartphones.

I will not deny that the internet could be a safer place and everyone's devices could be more secure if everyone would just keep their systems up to date. Cybercrooks are constantly discovering vulnerabilities in Operating Systems that the makers, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. fix with updates. A problem is that these same companies often want to go beyond fixing problems by forcing new features on users who would prefer that their computers and smartphones remain unchanged, updated with the latest security-related fixes, but unchanged so far as new and different features are concerned.

The fact is that most people are averse to change. Software makers seem to justify their behavior by pointing out how updates are needed to ensure online security. And it is true that there have been several times when the entire internet could have been badly compromised if bad actors had been successful in exploiting an un-patched zero-day vulnerability in millions of computers. Fortunately, those possible catastrophes have so far been avoided when Apple, Microsoft, and others have from time to time pushed out updates to millions of user's devices without the consent of the device owners. It was either do that or risk the possibility of a worldwide internet outage caused by hackers exploiting the un-patched devices.

So, I do see that there is a legitimate need to sometimes force some updates that we consumers might be likely to ignore, but very few so-called "Critical" updates fall into this category. Most of the dozens of monthly updates from Apple and Microsoft fall into the category of being less critical, so I along with most tech-savvy users prefer to wait a month or two in order to gauge if some update or another is found to have some unintended consequences. This is something Microsoft allows its corporate Enterprise users to do, but we "Home" users of Windows are unpaid guinea pigs. We can postpone receiving Microsoft's updates for seven days, but then we get them like it or not.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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