I had a lovely weekend, right up to the point last night when I set a security update running on my mobile. It now appears to be comprehensively bricked and unable to restart even after applying the wipe and reset options from the boot control menu. It may be possible to fix but I won’t be surprised if a second new phone in the year is in the offing. Meanwhile, I won’t be answering calls or texts for another day or two.

Did the security update succeed. Confidentiality is now absolutely protected on the device. However, information also has the dimensions of integrity and availability and, on those counts, I would say it has failed dismally. I haven’t picked up a wave of complaints on the interwebs yet so it may not be all Android users or even all Nokia 5 users. Possibly, I just got unlucky and a range of critical factors all combined at the same point.

The resultant advice isn’t to avoid updates, particularly security ones. However, one does need to think about points of failure. I might have lost saved text and WhatsApp messages but I treat those as fairly ephemeral things anyway; no real loss. All data, including photos and contacts, are automatically backed up to various cloud services so that won’t be an issue. Perhaps that is the real security message – treat each device as something that could fail unexpectedly at any time and consider what your fallback plans are.