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Typical Windows User Patches Every 5 Days
CWmike writes "The typical home user running Windows faces the 'unreasonable' task of patching software an average of every five days, security research company Secunia said on Thursday. 'It's completely unreasonable to expect users to master so many different patch mechanisms and spend so much time patching,' said Thomas Kristensen, the company's CSO. The result: Few consumers devote the time and attention necessary to stay atop the patching job, which leaves them open to attack. Secunia says that of the users who ran the company's Personal Software Inspector in the last week of January, half had 66 or more programs from 22 or more different vendors on their machines. ... Secunia has published a white paper (PDF) that details its findings."
patching for Windows is largely automated...
Heck, my Linux has patches every day and I kinda see that as a good thing.
This is my sig.
Funny--my Firefox updates when I start it up, my Flash and Java and Adobe Reader update essentially on their own, and Windows updates when I shut it down...Steam updates on its own...Trillian and uTorrent give me a button to push to update them...I'm pretty much a power user, but I've never been prompted to update something that was remotely confusing. As long as things that need updating have an easy button to push to do it for you, I'm happy--extra bonus points if there's a checkbox in the installer to choose between "update automatically" and "prompt annoyingly when an update is available"
We can manage all those patches for them!
Seriously, that is what this looks like to me. It is a load of bullshit over all. Reason being that few things actually need patches for security reasons. The OS, virus scanner, browser, browser plugins and so on sure. However a videogame? No probably not. Well guess what? Turns out most of the stuff that needs patching, patches itself. Windows downloads patches and applies them in the middle of the night. Firefox grabs new versions when you surf, and installs next time it starts up. Virus scanners update silently in the background all the time.
If people actually had to spend time managing patches on all their apps, sure ti might be a problem. However for the most part that isn't the case. In the default config most important apps update themselves.
My Ubuntu installation updates and patches way more often than my Windows installs do. Newsworthy? Didn't think so /.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Patches breaking things is a big deal. Nothing will convince users to never allow updates faster than having one break their system when they desperately need it to be working.
A close second is having MS sneak in user hostile changes under the guise of a critical security update. That makes it impossible to even convince users to "risk it" even for the really important updates.
Though even in the case of Debian, I'm a bit too paranoid to do updates by cron job, it's good enough that if I don't see any rending of garments on debian-security, I presume it's safe enough to try on one system. If nothing bad happens, the rest get updated right away.