Friday, February 12, 2016

[kzlydats] Computers agnostic to the real world

What software will require an update if there is a political change in the world?  Assume the software normally functions without network.  The canonical example is the time zones database.

Political changes could also include various businesses opening and closing up shop, rebranding, changing their APIs, causing a software update that does something other than fix bugs and add features, a reaction to changes in the real world.

Antivirus might also be in this category.

There is something different, unnerving, about computer software that knows (or tries to know) too much about the real world, in contrast to a computer as a pure number cruncher.  Arithmetic isn't affected by politics.

Consider labeling/tagging such software in a software package manager, as well as providing the ability to completely remove all such software.

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