In the world of computing devices, like laptops and smartphones, and increasingly, cars and scooters and just about everything else.

There are toasters with computer innards these days.

A patch is a piece of software that makes additions or changes to existing software within a

particular device.

So you might have a video game patch that downloads onto your Xbox, and that patch adds

new functionality to a game.

It corrects a bug, or it makes some other update to that software, and that update, these

days at least, will generally be delivered via the internet, or in some cases over the air, via

wireless cellular signal or Wi-Fi, the latter of which isn't technically OTA over the air in the traditional

sense, which initially referred to updates made via radio signal. But according to the way that we use

that term today, a lot of our updates happen OTA. So these patches arrive seemingly by magic,

keeping our devices updated to the most recent version.

There are a few caveats and details that are important to mention here, so that this technology

makes sense in the context of the broader topic that I want to discuss today.

First, these updates almost always require that we approve the updates before they are fully implemented.

This is a safety and rights-related thing, and it's part of what distinguishes the modern way

of doing OTA updates from the previous radio-based implementation.

Back in the day, centralized channel managers controlling the hub where all these different signals connected

could send whatever updates they wanted to everyone connected to that hub,

and those devices would update automatically without human approval or intervention required.

There were positive aspects to this way of doing things.

All software on the network was always updated to the most recent version,

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