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Bugtraq archives for 3rd quarter (Jul-Sep) 1998: Re: Yahoo Pager auto-update

Re: Yahoo Pager auto-update

Chris Wedgwood (chrisCYBERNET.CO.NZ)
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 10:17:06 +1200 

On Wed, Aug 05, 1998 at 04:51:25PM -0700, Sergiy Zhuk wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Ralf Rudolph wrote:
>
> > btw: The yahoo pager is only one example: Many software vendors offer
> > online upgrades. It just sounds like a bad idea to me to allow this
>
> yes, Symantec, for example...

Actually, form the point of view of having to look after thousands of
lusers with a combined IQ on 9, automatic upgrades are incredibly
attractive. I would estimate that fewer than 50% of modern 'net users
are incapable of saving a file to the desktop and then executing it,
without considerably hand holding - let alone trying to verify it is
indeed the correct file.

If downloaded updates can be verifying using a key/certificate that
originally came with the ship physical media, then for many
non-technical people this is a safer and superior solution that
manually downloading and installing updates for the simple reason
that many non-technical people can easily be duped into downloading
and installing bogus or trojan software.



-cw