I was recently at a meeting of otherwise fairly tech-savvy people, and the subject meandered on to patches. A surprising number of people had never updated their stock Windows XP install. Some cited lack of trust in Microsoft. Others were worried about their system suddenly becoming unstable. (Those sets overlapped.) Two people used the "I only plug my laptop in behind a firewall" excuse.
Hah. Hah, I say. Someone's gonna get 0wn3d, if they haven't been already.
although it's not exactly to do with patches, I know of quite a few people who've never bothered to update their antivirus. It is only a few megabytes, but they just don't bother..
A few years of doing this, and if they don't have virus attacks, and they wonder about the practice of having antivirus at all. I guess it's only a big deal if you get online (some machines are just standalone) and also if you expose your machines to applications from (possibly) untrustworthy sources..
Isn't patching an extension of this ? Yes, it is nice to be safe. (as if patches assured that, I am not so sure they always do, especially with MS Windows) But if you're sure that you're not going to be online, what could bring your machine down ? I've heard that view expressed by several people.
The flip side: if something hits, you will go down hard and burst into flames.
Further to this, there is a healthy industry built on MS products that sell only because people would rather use the same software and play the same games as everybody else, such as Virus Checkers, personal firewalls, millions of shareware tools to fix holes or add basic functionality, etc.
Its a way of life for windows users. Its how they have always used computers, and its all they know.
