Online updates for everything

I have had a Samsung Galaxy Note II for a couple of years now and every once in a while it displays an icon telling me to update the software. I have learned to ignore the icon, but at least once in the last couple of years the phone has pretty much forced me to do the update.

I noticed the same with my new car. It seems to need an update for the navigation system ever so often and if you ignore the recommendation, the system refuses to show you any maps or provide any directions until the update is done.

This is getting worrisome; for it means that providers of any equipment we buy can pretty much decide to shut it down when they see fit. I used to believe that when we buy a piece of equipment we purchase legal title to the equipment, but these days it seems like what we are buying is more along the lines of a user licence.

There have also been some rumours about  3G dongles manufactured by a certain Chinese manufacturer have been surreptitiously sending information back to the manufacturer in China; so much so that this manufacturer has been debarred from selling telephony equipment in the United States.

If you have read O Jerusalem, you will remember that the French had willing sold guns to the young Israel in the late 1940s but then refused to sell them ammunition to fight the Arab states. Israel then vowed to develop its own manufacture of defence equipment.

I wonder how the defence establishment in India is tackling this issue. What if France decides that we should not be using the new Rafale aircraft against a particular enemy? Can they communicate with the aircraft through a backdoor to shut down the avionics systems or prevent the engine from firing up? Can we be sure there are no latent trojans or viruses installed in the GPS or Navigation software that can be activated remotely? Perhaps the old analog avionics systems in Russian aircraft have advantages beyond simple maintenance.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to move my SIM card from my Android phone to this Mitsubishi M34i clamshell phone that I managed to find online.