I recently had a corporate website dump about 20 instances of a java trojan onto
my office computer. Our IT manager caught it in the morning report from the AV.
He said that nearly all of the intrusions he deals with each day are java
exploits.

The IT manager also said the newer versions of Firefox seem to have more
security problems than IE. That seems weird, but apparently Mozilla is letting
their guard down to attract a wider following, possibly from corporate sponsors.

What I find even more puzzling is that my home XP box that hasn't been updated
in years (SP2 and Firefox 3.6) has virtually no problems whatsoever.

I turned off all updates (except AV) 6-8 years ago because I got tired of
so-called security fixes that crashed the machines.

My Ubuntu machines are not online much and I'm still learning Linux. However, I
get the impression that Linux updates lead to the same headaches as with
Windows.

And I can't help feeling that newer java, like newer Firefox and newer Windows,
is less secure than the old stuff. Those back doors aren't bugs, they're
features.