Update Age

In the last two months I faced a task again and again that continuously consumes time: Software Updates.

Not, that this is something unusual on a PC, but two years ago updating software was a task only limited to computers.

Yesterday I had to got to the mechanic because of a security software update for my car!

Without thinking too much I have the following items to maintain with software updates to keep them secure and (hope to) fix annoying bugs:

• Computer at work
• Computer at home
• Mobile phone of my wife
• My own mobile phone
• Our car
• SAT receiver

And I am not talking about the details - e.g. different behaviour or new bugs after applying several updates. On Windows it is extremely more time intensive to keep all the software pieces up to date. Some pieces don't have an autoupdate implemented and often I disable it to avoid annoying popups all the time notifying about the updates. I prefer to do it - depending on usage - in bigger time intervals (often more than a month between updates). But anyway it is time consuming.

This is very annoying! When the economic crisis has passed we will be in the middle of the Update age. I am just waiting for our washing machine to need a bugfix update because not stopping to rotate any more "under some circumstances".

And I don't see a real solution: I can choose between keeping everything secure or being hacked and having an incident while driving home.

My humble suggestions to minimize the effort:

1. When planning new IT systems take into consideration how easy to maintain and update.
2. Prefer simple and easy solutions - those have less (security) issues.
3. Reduce the amount of needed systems.