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Automatic Software Update National Management Firewall Needed

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
Often, a person on the computer may find that their computers are asking for a delay to their activities, as it has to perform certain "updates". This creates an un-necessary delay to the undertakings of the person, and in a business environment, this would be a major risk for business activities and business failures.


Also, when developing online software products, if some of the underlying software infrastructure is automatically updated, this may also cause a crash of the web server (actually happened to me!). 


This urgently calls for a National Infrastructure to monitor and release any software that is being sent online, especially for critical digital infrastructures such as Operating Systems, Web Technologies etc. A 'Firewall' for software updates that adheres to, engages and complies with the digital market environment has to be implemented. 


Otherwise, quite literally, we are at the mercy of a seemingly well-intending "Update" that simply destroys our time and work.
  • 0
    Sounds like a terrible idea.  A national organisation gets to decide what software you are allowed to have on your computer.  If it's not approved, you can't have it.


    And unless everybody has to run the same operating system on the same computer, this is unlikely to solve any of the problems we actually have with software updates.
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    On Linux, updates are completely transparent to the user (no business downtime) and most of the time they don't require a reboot.


    Windows handles updates terribly - not to mention that they often introduce new defects. It's the system that is wrong, badly designed, and has grown so bloaty that Microsoft can't get a grasp on it.


    Having a government organisation to assess whether every single update on every single OS should be rolled out is completely impractical - think of the amount of overhead that it would cause.


    However I agree that in some environments auto-installing updates can be dangerous. In the telco industry, where I worked for 20 years, every patch required extensive testing to ensure it wouldn't introduce side effects.

  • 0
    In my very limited Linux experience, updates are completely transparent to the user until they stop without warning.


    A few years back, I downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint.  For a few months, it got regular updates.  Then I got warnings from Firefox that it was out-of-date.  It turns out that the version I had installed was abandoned within one year.  There was no update path other than installing a whole new copy of the operating system over the top of my old one.  If I did that, there was no guarantee that my files and settings would be preserved.


    At least Microsoft gives several years of support for their operating systems.
  • 0
    "This urgently calls for a National Infrastructure to monitor and release any software that is being sent online"


    I cannot even begin to imagine what this would look like. But I also think it's a terrible idea. We as users, personally and professionally are responsible for making sure the software we choose to use does what we want it to. That's why there's release notes for new versions of software. That's why operating systems and databases and applications are tested extensively in industry before they are put to any sort of "live" use. Software updates are not just installed directly from the internet onto business systems (at least in my industry) at the whim of the company developing them.


    If a software bug or unadvertised "feature" finds its way through the user's testing (which does of course happen regularly) that's a matter for the user and the software company who sold them the software.

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