Easy now, don’t panic. R2D2 and C-3P0 aren’t turning hostile and attacking Verizon phone users. However, in a strange bit of information coming to light regarding the phone company’s new Droid cellphones, a bug recently discovered in the phone has been mistaken for what Charlie Sorrels at the WIRED Blog calls “a secret, silent, over the air invasion by Verizon’s software update police.”

Image by Polimerek

“When a problem with the Droid’s autofocus mysteriously disappeared overnight, paranoid Droid owners assumed that a secret update had been sent over the air to fix it,” Sorrels writes. “This would be rather creepy. It is also wrong. In a comment on an Engadget story about the mystery fix, Android developer Dan Morrill explained what had happened, and the truth is rather stranger than the fiction.” And what was Morrel’s excuse? He says there’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine, apparently controlled via timestamp, that is making the autofocus function on the phone’s camera to malfunction on a 24.5-day cycle. “It’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again,” Morrel explained. “(November) 17th is the start of a new ‘works correctly’ cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.”

Many of us have experienced Windows Updates (especially on earlier, less-stable versions of some of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, Vista in particular) which were downloaded and installed, thus actually compromising the speed and overall function of our PCs. On numerous occasions shortly after the release of Windows Vista, I was forced to do complete factory reboots to my Vista-sporting laptop, preventing it from downloading any updates for months at a time, until the various updates finally “stabilized.” Thus is the bane of any new operating system; if the buyer leaps on the new trend and buys a newly released OS, they are often forced to become “guinea pigs” to help weed out errors and bugs in the fledgling system’s software. Many early users of Vista were so unhappy with the new version that they were reverting back to Windows XP, which by now, is likely the most stable OS Microsoft offers.

This taken into consideration, users of the brand new Droid phones might begin to express the same feelings toward “secret” updates sent to their already malfunctioning phones. With most OS-based interfaces, users have the option of choosing whether they download and install updates on their computers. The same idea applies to applications used on the popular Blackberry phones, which users can browse the web and find for popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even for ease of accessing online banking.

However, some folks are casting a shady eye toward the notion of “secret updates” sent to Droid phones. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber is one of the few on the web screaming bloody murder about Verizon’s actions. “Am I the only one who thinks that if Apple issued an over-the-air iPhone software update — no notice, no confirmation — that it would generate a Category 5 shit storm?” Indeed, if Apple had done this with the popular iPhones, the web would be ablaze with criticisms.So why so much silence about the Verizon situation? Probably because, as stated earlier, the bug was only mistaken for being a secret update, rather than actually turning out to be one. Nonetheless, this sort of activity may have gadget junkies on their toes looking for future conspiracies of the update-kind.