Bluetooth root exploit & "out-of-date" Macs

jiclark (apparently) - 01:14pm Oct 26, 2006 PST
via email

In this morning's ExtraBITS, as a part of the story about the latest
security flaw facing Macs with Bluetooth, there was the following
comment:

"…those Mac users have to have Bluetooth turned on and be out of date
on patches by months - or by more than a year!"

The implication is that this would be somehow unusual. I thought I'd
chime in to say that, as a small-time Mac consultant, I regularly see
machines that are *far* more 'out-of-date' than a year. It's quite
common actually, and relates to another common experience I have when
helping the average Mac user. That is, the tendency for people to be
unsure about whether or not they need to install every update that
appears in Software Update, and more often than not, their avoidance
of doing so.

In my opinion, Apple needs to do a better job of somehow flagging the
really essential updates, since the presence of things like the
"iTunes Phone Driver" makes it obvious that a lot of stuff that shows
up in SU is *not* essential. Maybe by highlighting essential updates
in red? I know the preference pane has a checkbox the enables the
downloading of "essential software" in the background, but for a lot
of the people I support, that's not workable, since broadband is
anything but ubiquitous around here.

While it's exciting to see Apple's current success and the increasing
market-share that goes along with that, they would be wise to come up
with a better way to get people to keep their software up-to-date, or
it will come back to haunt them someday…

I only post this because I feel like the closer one is to the rank of
'power user' these days, the farther out of touch they get with the
far greater number of 'average' users. Of course, by definition,
almost everyone that works at Apple falls into this category! Let's
just hope their not too arrogant (or simply out of touch) to pay
attention to issues such as this.

Thanks, I'm back to lurk mode now!
John