[Android General] linuxct:
Before proceeding any further:

As you may already know, Cyanogen Inc. has shut down the CyanogenMod project, and will end some of the Cyanogen services by the end of this year. However, Cyanogen is still able to supply updates for the elegible devices whose manufacturer partnered with Cyanogen Inc., like Wileyfox, bq, YU, OPPO, OnePlus, ZUK and Smartfren. You can have a look at this extensive article in the XDA Portal for more info. about the CyanogenMod death, and have a look here for a complete list of Cyanogen-supported devices.

The nightmare:

A user on the /r/programming subreddit submitted this great post, explaining the perspective as a former-Cyanogen-employee. There, it's explained that all of the CyanogenOS core developers were already fired, and the rest were either looking for another job or just abandoned the company. That leads to a company with barely any developers in their staff.

After, reading this, the only thing that came to my mind was "Who the f*** is pushing the updates to the devices?", and what's even more, what do those updates exactly contain?

The post responses go into a sort-of AMA, and the former employee comments here that Cyanogen has 2 OTA systems, the one that handles the OS upgrades, just like in CyanogenMod, and the Ambient Updater, that handles silent packages updates, which doesn't notify the user nor ask for permissions to install the new apps. This could be used to update Cyanogen components on demand, based on what the aerios server say it should install.

By the perspective of this former employee, I can only see that Cyanogen is completely broken, and, I'm quite skeptical of what's going to happen with future updates, if they'll try to do something to our devices. Maybe nothing bad happens, they hire new developers and get back to work, who knows... But I, personally, cannot trust them in this state.

How to disable automatic updates on Cyanogen OS devices:

Requirements: Android ADB Drivers (if on pc), or a Terminal Emulator app from Play Store/the built-in Terminal that can be enabled from Developer options, named Local terminal.

Go into Settings, About device, and tap 7 times on Build number. This will unhide the Developer options. Press the back key on your device and enter that menu.

Now find the Root access, or Administrative access setting, and change it to Apps and ADB.

If on PC: Connect your device to your PC, open a command prompt and type in adb shell. Continue to next step.

If you have no access to a PC: Open the Terminal Emulator app. Continue to next step.

Now type in the following commands.

su

(Now a prompt will appear on the device screen, tap on Remember and hit Allow).

pm disable [COLOR="DarkOrchid"]com.cyngn.ambient.updater[/COLOR]
pm disable [COLOR="darkorchid"]com.cyngn.fota[/COLOR]

The output for them should be something like:

Package [COLOR="darkorchid"]com.cyngn.ambient.updater[/COLOR] new state: disabled

However, it's also possible the package's missing in your system, returning an error:

Error: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unknown package: [COLOR="DarkOrchid"]com.cyngn.ambient.updater[/COLOR]

If that's the case, either the app already self-updated and changed the package name (which is highly improbable), or, it's just not included in your device.

That should do the job, but, if you want to go further, you can go to your system partition, mount it as R/W and fully delete those two apps, named System Updates (Cyanogen Updates sometimes), and Ambient Updater.

Final thoughts / What can I do now?

No one knows what Cyanogen Inc is planning except them, but, if they keep firing their devs and try to make money from advertising malware, as the former employee suggests, I'd want to stay as far away from them as possible.

My personnal recommendation: Go into your device subforum, if it has one, and look up what are the alternative ROMs available for it, unlock your bootloader, flash a custom Recovery and the ROM of your preference, at least until our respective OEM says what happens next with the Stock ROM updates.

Merry Christmas, Cyanogen!