Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The article puts the blame on

> Never Update, Auto-Updates And Change Are Bad

as the source of the problem a couple of times.

This is pretty common take from security professionals, and I wish they'd also call out the other side of the equation: organizations bundling their "feature" (i.e. enshittification) updates and security updates together. "Always keep your programs updated" is just not feasible advice anymore given that upgrades as just as likely to be downgrades these days. If that were to be realistic advice, we need more pressure on companies to separate out security-related updates and allow people to get updates only on that channel.




In essence, you are agreeing that this is the root cause, you just seem to believe it's unrealistic to fix it.

I actually think it's viable to fix, I am simply not sure if anyone would pay for it — basically, old LTS model from Linux distributions where a set of packages gets 5 or 10 years of guaranteed security updates (backported, maintaining backwards compatibility otherwise).

If one was to start a business of "give me a list of your FLOSS dependencies and I'll backport security fixes for you for X", what's X for you?


Aren't you just reinventing Red Hat?


That's the other way around (and also SuSE, Ubuntu LTS and even Debian stable): here are the things you can get security backports for vs here are the security backports for things you need.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: