they're probably patching a security flaw, because we live in the future now and it is perfectly normal for a simple clock to have backdoors that can read your bank accounts
The companies BUILD IN backdoors so that they can steal your data.
But because the backdoor is built in, they have to constantly monitor and update the security around it so that "bad guys" (they don't think they are the bad guys) don't get in.
They only do security updates to prevent liability iirc.
The whole thing stinks.
Note: I'm not a software developer just an outraged bystander with tech hobbies and techy friends, it's possible this isn't true.
No need for backdoors when the front door is perfectly legal. The need to monitor for bad actors is still correct, though; mostly because they skimp on development costs and penetration testing. Like they say, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." Or in this case, slashing budgets.
What would the "front door" even be in this case? What comes to my mind is the corresponding app on your phone, but that doesn't really make sense in this context.
In this case, the "front door" would just be not hiding it. Normal, un-hidden APIs. A back door is usually something that the developer includes without informing the user, but they don't need to be surreptitious; there's no legal reason to pretend that they're not collecting the data, and unless you've built your brand on privacy and security, there's no business reason to do so either in the current cultural climate.
And given that the appliance needs to communicate with the app on your phone while you're not home in the first place, there probably isn't even a separate tracking API vs. data just being harvested as part of normal operations. So "back door" doesn't really fit. "Broken by design" or "spyware" would be more apt, I think.
Still, I'm really not a fan of calling any spying/data harvesting a "front door" -- IIRC, the term was coined by an FBI head pushing for back doors in our phones so the FBI could scan our messages. But he called it a "front door" as a way to dodge the reasons why building back doors in our security software is a terrible idea.
It's just another step in the terrible trend of "let's pretend that this horrible idea is ok if we just rename it" :(
"My dishwasher is on the internet!" - "Why is on the internet?" - "To download software updates!" - "Why does it need software updates?" - "To fix security vulnerabilities!" - "Why would it have security vulnerabilities?" -"Because it's on the internet!"
Click the clock on the taskbar, which has worked as far as I remember, maybe even before Windows 95. Notifications and calendar pop up but no seconds.
Search “seconds” in settings. Apparently you can only have them shown on the taskbar permanently (with implied distraction and CPU usage).
Look in time settings. No seconds, either.
Open the Clock app. The update takes a minute. No seconds there, either.
Search the internet. Apparently this is a function Microsoft disabled in Windows 11 but can be restored with Explorer Patcher, along with the option to set taskbar transparency via Classic Shell (so that you can watch the status in another window while others are maximized).
Don't have time for that, install Linux instead
(I’m not even kodding. The only place where a vanilla Windows 11 installation will show seconds in GUI is a very obscure page deep in the unintuitive jungle of settings. Interesting that a $3 watch does something a Windows computer with a million times more transistors doesn't.)
