Cyber Show on How Updates or Upgrades Break Workflows, Even in Free Software
"We did a big upgrade on the AV production pipeline," The Cyber Show wrote yesterday, "replacing Ubuntu Studio with AV Linux. Both AV Linux and the new Ardour 9 are amazing but there were also many serious problems that have taken days to fix and prompted me to write this post today."
From "Living Code":
The interactive venue is a shared space with many spheres of interest. As I wrote in Digital Vegan quite a while ago now, the problem with Silicon Valley "tech-bros" was that they treated the Internet as their own personal laboratory for experimenting on the world with no ethical oversight. It took the world almost two decades to even realise what was being done to them and the harms being visited on everyone by billionaires.[...]
I'll level with you, I think Google are a nest of psychopaths. Their relation to technology as about as close to purely abusive as you can get. By the way, here's the rap sheet: Killed by Google This is a bone pile of lost opportunity smouldering from a bonfire of human potential.
What is horrific is not the scale of the waste, but the fact that Google probably feel they're entitled to do that. Somewhere someone is saying "We created it, we have the right to destroy it". And of course my response is "Do you feel that way about your children?" You really imagine yourself an Old Testament God, toying with Job?
[...]
In Cybersecurity we tell people to keep updating software. That's a dishonest posture and something we must all examine, because there are many serious downsides to "upgrading".
It's not cynical to understand that the point of daily updates is not to ensure the "security" of the end user so much as to permit a lazy form of development with low quality control standards. A minimal viable product is shipped and then "developed in the field", requiring constant access to the end-user's computer as if it were an outpost of the development pipeline.
For one thing that hugely detracts from your security, because you just totally conceded control of your realm to someone else.
I often tell people; "Don't update. Isolate." Keep working within a hermetic environment that you have tweaked and hardened, because the work you've put in to perfecting and understanding that environment is worth much more than the minor security or performance advantages an upgrade will bring.
[...]
Richard Stallman sells FOSS on the "empowerment of users". That's true, to a degree. Anyone who's been stiffed by a proprietary software firm who brush you off with no recourse knows how powerless it feels.
I use Free Software because thirty years ago when working at the BBC I had synthesiser program called Reaktor, which caused me to lose about twenty thousand pounds in contracts and abandon many months of work. It was all because of a copy protection "dongle" - a stupid USB device that basically trashed all my projects including those for prominent bands I was working with in the studio.
[...]
The Cyber Show gets no sponsorship. That's so we can stay independent and speak the truth as we see it. That means we can't afford to pay for proprietary software or even donate to the good guys like Ardour that make our work possible. If we had cash flow I think David and Robin's team would be people we'd donate to.
I don't have time to regress the whole installation back to Ardour 7, so a lot of work on Cyber Show episodes and music beds is lost if I update to Ardour 9. For now we're blocked. I'll carry on with Ardour 9 for experimenting, but production is now split between versions which will complocate things.
These are problems of ALL modern software engineering in general. Using FOSS is not all rainbows and unicorns. It has as many serious practical pitfalls as proprietary wares.
One contingency is to keep one - or more - machine air-gapped/offline ("insulated" is the term used above) for important tasks that are sensitive to interruption by change. █