Automatic updates are themselves a security risk, which is something that I rarely hear talked about. For example, the FBI's 2015/2016 dispute with Apple about unlocking phones. The FBI's position relied on the fact that Apple was technically capable of making a modified binary, then pushing it to the phones through automatic updates. If Apple were not capable of doing so (e.g. if updates needed to be approved by a logged-in user), then that vector of the FBI's attack wouldn't be possible.
I don't have the best solution for it, but the current trend I see on Hacker News of supporting automatic updates everywhere, sometimes without even giving users an opt-out let alone an opt-in, is rather alarming.
I don't argue for automatic updates. It's pretty much whatever we already have, but instead of updating a single library, you'd have to update every package that depends on that library.
I'm just throwing ideas around so you should definitely take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. It just would be interesting to see a distro like that and see what the downsides of this solution are. Chances are that there probably already is something like this and I'm just not aware of it and I'm reinventing the wheel.
Ah, got it. Sorry, I misinterpreted "update everything regularly" to imply developers forcing automatic updates on every user.
I'm in the same boat, as somebody who isn't in the security field. I try to keep up with it, but will occasionally comment on things that I don't understand.
I don't have the best solution for it, but the current trend I see on Hacker News of supporting automatic updates everywhere, sometimes without even giving users an opt-out let alone an opt-in, is rather alarming.