automatic nightly updates

[Joe Harrington]

No, I don't think any distro enables them by default.  But Fedora,
Ubuntu, and RHEL all document and encourage the practice.  Remember
that there is a heavy cost to *not* updating, even for a short time,
and the vast majority of users don't do manual updates, whether for
lack of knowledge, time, or motivation.  So it's a matter of choosing
the better of two evils, for most people, and hence for the distros.

If you consider that the source of your updates is the same as the
source of your base OS, you should in principle be happy to get any
improvements.  Regarding non-invasiveness, anything truly malicious
wouldn't advertize itself in the update email.  Also, wouldn't someone
producing such a thing put it in the base OS, to get a bigger
audience?  And in either case, it would be found and fixed quickly.
You'd want automatic updates then for sure (of course, if the hack
were any good, it would turn them off).

--jh--