> We need to make it easier to use old software. This pressure to constantly upgrade all software is also leaving many good software behind. Old software that w

> We need to make it easier to use old software. This pressure to constantly upgrade all software is also leaving many good software behind. Old software that worked great in their particular milieu. Yep, agreed. I think the steps for consumer-operable, secure personal devices and software are relatively straightforward. - Code should be open source and available from widely-mirrored common publishers - Builds should be reproducible (partially addressing your concerns) - Auto-updates should be turned on by default, but can always be disabled (also addressing your concerns) Proprietary software and auto-updates run the risk that user-harmful changes may be introduced with close to zero ability for the developer community to inspect, reason about, report and fix them. Most of those harmful changes are small errors and accidental mistakes, but they go easily unnoticed in a world where developed code is unlikely to be seen, and where the customer has little ability to see (at install-time or retrospectively) the contents of updates. If you have a safety-critical and/or widely-used system, then before applying a change, you'd ideally like to know exactly what the contents of that change are, be able to read and figure out what impact it will have, and then choose if and when to update. If that works well for service infrastructure -- and I think it does -- there's little reason to expect it should be any different for personal devices and software. This kind of visibility can be opt-in for everyday consumers, but the transparency should exist so that developers (a large and growing community, with incentives to assist) can help to make the ecosystem safe and healthy. Most of the challenges introducing this are social rather than technical I think. Some developers aren't used to (and may legitimately feel uncomfortable with) writing code and making mistakes in public, app stores have ossified and are cash cows, and channeling worldwide code review and feedback to developers can be a challenge (albeit a fairly well-understood one at this point).