To Upgrade Or Not To Upgrade?, Who knows more? Options

[maemorandum]

I decided to create a new debian eabi system on my sdcard, because i am getting more and more problems after my monthly apt-get upgrades.
On the one hand, my multimedia and browser aplications are working better than ever. On the other hand i am getting more and more troubles with my wireless applications.

So, again, i followed the steps of the excellent
A Clean, Fresh, Configured Eabi Rootfs Tarball installation guide

But, this time, i didnt want to use the actual sources.list. So i used the debian-snapshot of the old debian-server

CODE

http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/YYYY/MM/DD/debian

from february 2008.

Surprisingly i found out, that with the old upgrade i was able to do all wpa cryptics without problems! Especially the wireless-driver worked without problems. The strangest upgrade-effect i claimed was, that - once connected - the MTU changes from 1500 to 750!!!! This change will cause most of the wireless sniffing tools to fail because it limits the traffic of packets.

Coincidence or intention? Do we need upgrades, and who controls them? In the end, are they political?