Skip to main content

Upgrades

I upgrade software regularly. It has become easier to do so with each passing year. Early on I had to plan for it, reach out to repositories, etc. Nowadays the software will usually prompt me.

Many folk don't like software updates, because the cost in convenience can be high. Even subtle changes in user interface can break many unarticulated means of working. The benefits are often hard to perceive:  new features that you didn't know that you wanted.

The main reason that I regularly update is the benefit people don't like to think about:  increased security.  Everyday a large number of people spend their day trying to break into other people's computing technology. I saw this up and close when I hosted my own web server; I'd say the main reason I stopped at the end was the required vigilance as literally thousands of entities tried to break in each day.

From my casual perusal of security blogs it seems as if the majority of break-ins occur because folk have not updated their software because of the inconvenience. Newer versions of software are inevitably more secure. The image that comes to my mind is that of someone too lazy to lock their front door in an area prone to burglaries.

Operating system upgrades have a larger cost, hours of lost productivity during the reboot and the subsequent shakedown period. The need for improved security is much greater there.

My father taught me to respect my tools in order to get the best performance possible out of them. I don't do woodwork but I still follow in his footsteps.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more