On Computers: First Rule on Updating Software – Don’t | Hacker News Reader

On Computers: First Rule on Updating Software – Don’t

telegram.com

21 pointsfortran7732 comments

Wow, this "article" is tabloid-tier garbage. Seriously; it's the online equivalent of an opinion column in your grandmother's Sunday church newspaper.

Some quotes:

>> "[don't] click on suspicious links and attachments, like Mark Zuckerberg did recently. He opened a video from a Saudi prince and his computer was immediately infected with malware."

Uh, no. That was Jeff Bezos and it was a mobile phone (via Whatsapp), not a computer.

>> "runaround she got from Uber. For starters, she forgot her Uber password. But when she tapped “forgot password?” they sent the reset link to an email address she no longer uses"

How DARE Uber not magically update her email address when she changes it and doesn't inform them?

I'm in Germany, on my home connection. When I try to access the website I get the following:

> www.telegram.com - Access Denied

> Error code 16

> This request was blocked by the security rules

> 2020-02-03 16:54:50 UTC

> Origin Server IP N/A

> Incident ID: <redacted>

> Please Note: We are temporarily unavailable to users from certain countries while we upgrade our site to implement new methods for data processing as required by applicable laws.

> Powered by imperva

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same here. 4g mobile in UK.

Works here in India... Must be a CDN issue?

Probably a GDPR issue rather than a CDN issue.

You are not in the EU and therefore the GDPR does not apply to you.

Same here from a country in Europe.

Sovereignty bites sometimes.

UK, Same.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200203170045/https://www.teleg...

Same here from the UK. I wonder just how bad their data protection policies are to have to geoblock EU* countries?

EU folks, you’re not missing much.

This article has almost no substance beyond the headline. No information supporting it either. It also abruptly changes to the next topic halfway down.

Also, unless Zuck was recently hacked by a Saudi Prince, they are confusing their billionaires. It was Bezos who was compromised using an WhatsApp, which is owned by Zuck.

The page claims it's possible to get a free Windows 10 upgrade with a Windows 7 license but I thought that offer was long gone. Does anyone know if that actually still works?

Edit: Apparently it's possible if you've already got Win7 installed. But what if it's not installed but you possess a retail disk and key?

I only need it for Bootcamp and don't want to install 7 then upgrade to 10 via Bootcamp. (I'd be surprised if that's even possible due to the way Bootcamp works.)

Edit #2: It works just fine after all. My Windows 7 (retail) key was recognized as a valid key in Windows 10.

Can confirm it worked as of January

it never stopped working. Run the Win10 iso/exe on a licensed Win7 computer, and your Win10 will be activated with Digital Entitlement.

The "this is ending soon" was a scare campaign to get people to upgrade in a timely manner.

Or, even better if you want a clean install, just use your Win7 serial to activate Win10. As long as you match edition (Home/Pro), it should work fine.

Or you want a clean enough install, choose upgrade, and then keep nothing.

Really? That's great news. I'm off to try it now.

Added: It worked, thanks! It even automatically upgrading my unlicensed Win10 "Home" to Win10 "Pro" since my license was for Win 7 Ultimate.

It still works. the outstanding question is will it be a licensed copy? You can activate it, but there is still ambiguity to if it will pass a license audit.

More people should be supporting Linux and the BSDs knowing that support and updates often lasts much longer. They would be great for systems in Doctor's offices and such as noted.

Ubuntu LTS releases lose support after 5 years. Windows 7 lost support after 10 years. You can freely upgrade ubuntu, but you can also freely upgrade windows, and windows feature releases remain supported for about as long as ubuntu LTS releases.

Also, windows has very good backwards compat for binaries, you can run decades-old binaries.

You should encourage users to upgrade by not having history of things breaking -- it used to not be free, and now it's not free as in freedom with all the tracking built in to the OS. I upgrade my Linux machine multiple times a day because I'm confident that things will be smooth and even when they're not it's usually one package at a time instead of the UI and all APIs changing on a monolithic release cycle. New versions fix up bugs and security, so we shouldn't be rolling with out-of-date software.

Since the linked page made the fans spin up on my laptop. Here is a trimread link https://beta.trimread.com/articles/4006

Also, here’s a snapshot (of the original page, which is blocked in the EU):

https://web.archive.org/web/20200203164738/https://www.teleg...

That's weird, anyone know why it's blocked in the EU? Edit: Aha, it's probably GDPR-related.

That surprised me, until I realised that this was telegram.COM, not Telegram.ORG (the chat).

I'm still running Windows 7 on my home PC with no plans to upgrade. I've been using Windows 10 on my work laptop for several years now and I absolutely hate it. For me it's slow, not intuitive, dealing with telemetry is annoying, and takes too long to find familiar options.

I've been meaning to switch to a Linux distro for good, but each time I run into some kind of driver problem that makes me go back to Windows. I'll just have to suck it up one of these days because I refuse to upgrade my home PC to that heap of trash Windows 10.

Some software I update. Some I do not. It depends on whether I suspect or have history of updates taking away or breaking features. Generally I update.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I roll.

I apply security-only updates pretty much automatically. If an update contains nonsecurity changes, then I wait until enough others have applied the update that I feel I have a good handle on what the update is actually doing. If it seems harmless, then I'll apply it.

If it changes features, functionality, or the UI, then I need to reevaluate the update as if it were new software. That takes me a little longer to do, so that adds additional time before I decide what my response to it will be.

Here's a website whose handling of private data is so bad that it's literally illegal in large parts of the world.

What the hell is this? This is not the calibre of content I expect from HN.

I believe it was posted here and upvoted so that people can mock it. Either way, this is not the type of thing I come to HN for.

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