Michael Fischer

Canterbury

Anthropologist

Apple certainly does automatically update drivers (and firmware on occasion), and Microsoft updates drivers (though a little more work).

In the case in point that was dragged into the article, the now (in)famous wi-fi exploit, this is a lot of noise about a real problem, but is a problem with wi-fi and not individual macs, windows and linux OS installations and drivers.

Wi-fi is an inherently insecure technology whose saving grace in most cases is limited range. Anyone in the office or the next house with a bit of crytographic knowledge and minimal hardware/software smarts can read you like a book if they are willing to put in a little effort. Or download kiddie porn or plan a terrorist attack.

And there are simpler ways. Since there is little info on what the exploit at hand for the wi-fi driver(s) was, but since it is shared, I will assume it is the usual one, that has been there all along on all wi-fi systems, and has doubtless been exploited on many occasions over the years.

Although fixes to the basic wi-fi concept are welcome, at the moment it is mostly, like trojans (on Macs anyway), a matter of common sense on the part of the user, and avoid joining just any old network that happens to become available.