Yes, it would be a brave company that put a custom ROM on their Android phones.
Less than 500 stores effected and there more than 15000 supermarkets in France. All the affected supermarkets knew they were running old insecure fridges but left them connected to the internet and rolled the dice accepting the risk. If you want a real risk consider the thousands of valve control points for oil, gas, water pipelines many having ancient electronic report & control hardware running 8 bit software with next to nothing encryption all over the world. UK until recently still had bank terminals running Windows NT, and you don’t even want to know poorly secured and flaky the software that ran the UK’s nuclear power stations was. Things change slowly, as nobody can afford the continued investment in software and hardware to keep things totally safe, industry aims for safe enough and values stability over continuous updates. Most “reliable” software is built on a tier of GPL freeware that in turn is maintained by volunteers, IT industry is a mess!
This is the correct approach. When I was in charge of tech support for a roster of clients one of my biggest tasks was educating the majority that they really really didn’t always need the latest update.
I deliberately kept most of them 2 or 3 versions behind. With their full agreement after I’d explained the risks. 3 versions back was about the limit. But the majority of them with businesses to run realised that they did not want to be the first to encounter whatever bug might be in our new release. And our new releases were generally of high quality but it wasn’t worth the risk. A far cry from the poor quality of sodtware that is often released today.
Luckily I also had a couple of software houses who were always very keen to get their hands on our latest software releases and ran them in a test environment first. So they found anything worth knowing about a new release quickly. If another customer really needed to upgrade I’d know any gotchas from my software houses.
I somewhat agree, there’s something of a “let other people discover the bugs” element to this - but sitting around with kit connected to the internet which has known security vulnerabilities is a bit like playing Russian roulette without an empty chamber these days,
Yes. Hence you can’t fall too far behind. But taking an update immediately is generally nuts.
Remember when Microsoft changed their updates to force them onto your system as soon as tbey were available? That caused nothing but trouble on my system for no benefit. Until I learned how to disable it since they’d removed the choice setting, and then peace reigned again.
The end user is a beta tester these days, especially for iThings where effective change control over a dozen merging and diverging software trains is next to impossible.
Fortunately, enough people, especially those taking the advanced beta releases enable the diagnostic reporting function so that the devs have a skip load of crash reports to sieve through to catch issues that scripted testing doesn’t.
The current problem for developers is actually too many reports as AI tools are used to scan for vulnerabilities and can do so many times faster than humans - obviously the good guys doing that feed back to the devs, the bad guys just exploit what they find.
My son is involved in Software testing QA for a company doing " middleware" . The company is being encouraged to use AI in both developing and QAing this ..and he is getting uneasy. He would normally be writing code to do the tests , and more lately is using AI to assist in writing these tests . The problem for him is he is starting to mistrust things which are opaque to him.
But who listens to scaremongering engineers?
I rarely buy anything from these fridges. To my mind, they are mostly full of rubbish, “amply” evidenced by the health problems many people have. Of course we are now seeing some individuals magically losing weight. I’m not against the drugs which are being used per se, but suspect it will just displace the problem, like many technofixes do.
Earlier in the year the chillers at my local Biocoop were u/s a couple of times. I couldn’t buy my favourite tofu, I just ate beans, veg and eggs instead. The bio Camembert for less than 3 euros sadly disappeared for a while, but I am not actually physically addicted to it. I buy meat for the hound sometimes, but let’s face it, dogs’ internals are designed to deal with rotten meat.
Now that local eating places seem in decline, I’m hoping those pizza dispensing machines which are appearing everywhere are well-linked by software, so that…![]()
The Hound, as you call him, and I share a great big cod dinner every Thursday evening, market day. The only difference is he gets croquettes with it instead of chips. ![]()
More processed than chips
You buy rotten meat for your dog, sounds cruel
No, I’m just pointing out that our dogs would survive quite well without fridges, in the event. In fact cheap unsuitable for humans meat might be more readily available for them! Gone are the days when I bought an oxheart from the local butcher for 50p. Now marrowbones are priced like chocolate.
The illusion of choice is what the supermarkets punt. Here ends today’s sermon…![]()
We buy the packs labelled for animals at our local intermarche or leclerc when we are over in France. I agree, just as the Van Tulleken’s say the 11 food companies in the world making most processed foods from 4 ingredients, I believe it was but lots of choice and bright packaging all made from the same stuff, turning off those freezers may have saved a life
No butter, milk, soft cheese, yogurt?
Does real butter need a fridge? Only if making crumble ![]()
It is usually in the chiller cabinet in the supermarkets
Yep, but not when I get it home, it lives in the butter dish on the counter top, no issues.