Absolutely no reason a text editor needs internet access.
I only update stuff through winget, which fetches the installer from github in a lot of cases, and changing a package requires a PR to the winget repo AFAIK. Not foolproof of course though.
For an open-source alternative, consider checking out - Lulu [0]. It's not as feature rich nor has impressive UI like the former but gets the main work done.
It's the best one I found after trying a few, because it's pretty easy to use, and lets me disable notification popups which is a part that always frustrates me about other options.
Wildcards are great, like you said for those apps that change the directory name every single update.
https://www.binisoft.org/wfc.php
It has some areas where improvement is needed, but the fundamentals work and the user interface design is decent.
I am surprised it's not more popular for Windows users. All of the alternatives I've tried have critical issues which made me dismiss them as unserious.
Also legitimate software (i.e. firewall/AV) cannot use "oldschool" tricks like system service descriptor table hooks to obtain godlike privileges these days, while malware sometimes can do this by exploiting vulnerabilities, so in such cases it may be an unequal fight.
> We tried to attestation sign the driver via new EV certificate by MS to fix the driver's limitation, but failed (see #108).
> So for now users have to disable the "Core Isolation: Memory Integrity" feature
Disabling HVCI doesn't sound like a good idea honestly. I mean they abuse kernel memory protection to bypass EV Certificate restrictions leaving the system in a state where another driver can mess with FW's internal structures using the same trick.
If you don’t need auto updates, just disable them.
More importantly, notepad++ being able to update itself is not the exploit here. Your OS’ package manager would download the same compromised binary as notepad++’s built in updater.