Why do computers force updates on you at certain points? Like “screw whatever you’re doing it’s update time!” Kind of thing.
In: Technology
Have you considered not using windows?
Ive been using the same SSD with Windows 10 on it for about 6 years now and have never been forced into a update. How are yall letting this happen?
Because the people who wrote that software are bad at their jobs.
No seriously.
They think you’re an idiot and need your hand forced.
Now don’t get me wrong: security updates are important, and they need to happen. But the way they do that is idiotic, and as a software developer, if anyone on my team suggested our software behave that way, they’d be summarily fired.
Windows specifically (and maybe macOS, but I have no experience with it) does this because if they didn’t, some people, mostly the people that need updates the most, would never update their computers. So you couple people running extremely old versions of an OS with various known security risks, and their financial information stored there, and you have a hacker’s dream.
In OSes like Linux distributions with any desktop environment though this don’t happen. Most of the times the OS shows you a “some packages have updates, update whenever you want” and you can update when you think is a good time for that. Part of the reason may be because the more tech illiterate people aren’t expected to use them, so you can assume your users will constantly update their OSes.
Cause it’s easier to do a small update than try to attempt to update woefully outdated software.
For everyone excusing this with “security updates” – if it were just those, updates would take seconds and it would be possible to run them in the background. Modern Windows updates contain ungodly amounts of unwanted bloat – changes to interfaces, reactivation of telemetry and other shit that was painstakingly disabled by the user before, advertising and so on.
Most of the answers here are something to the effect of “Users are stupid and need the brilliant engineers to protect them from themselves.” Perhaps that answers the ELI5, but it’s worth asking “Is this a morally acceptable way computers and their creators to treat human beings?”
Why should I have to surrender control of my system to the whims of some other party who has decided their software update is more important than whatever I was doing? It’s oppressive. But I guess it’s fair game if it was in the EULA.
“Citizens are too stupid and irresponsible to be trusted with X, therefore we, their brilliant rulers, must restrict or eliminate their access to X.” Depending on what X is and how free the country is, most people find this idea offensive and would not voluntarily sign up for it. But that’s what you do when you use Windows or other non free (as in freedom) software. My Samsung phone just forced me to install an update, but I guess that’s on me for buying it.
I am a software engineer who uses and works on non free software, so I am not getting on a high horse here, but I think it would be great if everyone thought critically about these things instead of just blindly accepting that it’s automatically OK for computers and their designers to exert control over our lives.
And how “voluntary” is the relationship, really?
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