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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Windows machines get forcibly updated because users kept letting their boxes be part of botnets which hurt other users.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if you're going to do forced updates then you might as well spend some time making the entire user experience nicer. I don't know what the technical challenges are exactly, but not forcing a reboot unless there's really a critical patch might be a good start.

And not mixing security fixes with feature upgrades, not forcing the latter to be installed would be nice. That would also reduce the massive breakage many windows updates cause due to poor quality and high change rate.

I think that might actually be harder than it sounds though, since Windows is such an integrated system.

That is a kind way of putting it. I would say Windows lacks modularity and is a messy monolith with a lot of spooky crosstalk.

Yeah, maybe. I don't really know much of the Windows internals, so I try not to assume too much (hence my question in the top comment[1], which was very much a "curiosity"-question, and not a "omg, wtf"-question).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656237

One day we'll reminisce about the time when it wasn't illegal to let your machine be on the internet without a mask.

And we were allowed to steer the car.

While criminal botherders are in a sense "more" responsible for the damage, Microsoft also has some liability in their negligence when then wrote vulnerable software. But it's relatively easy to hold MS accountable for their part than to extract damages from botherders. So MS either covers their butts by locking down the software or pays out the nose for damages.

If we have to give that up to save 1.35 million people's lives a year in car crashes then it's worth it.

Accepting such a giant restriction ('not allowed' implies no override) would mean you are at the mercy of whoever controls the self-driving cars. They can kidnap you any time you enter a car, or prevent you from using your car to escape, or just subtly make your life very difficult.

Historically, people that allowed themselves to completely fall into someone else's hands have not fared well. The words 'slavery' and 'genocide' tend to come up when describing their fate.

If we have to give that up to save 1.35 million people's lives a year in car crashes then it's worth it.

If you're really serious about getting death statistics down, outlaw alcohol and a dozen other things globally and save even more.

Microsoft could put effort into making Windows Updates completely silent and not require a reboot.

What makes you think that they didnt put effort?

tbh... does that matter? until they ship no-reboot-updates, their (hypothetical) effort doesn't do much for me....

It's not just Windows boxes. I recently upgraded someone's phone--running iOS 8. It had to be updated because an app that was important to her wouldn't run with it anymore.

Not by all that much. If we actually want to care about botnets let's put more priority on preventing IP spoofing.

Botnets can attack directly, and don't need to spoof IPs. A couple thousand residential computers doing TLS handshakes can ruin anyone's day just as fast as a few computers in a datacenter spoofing udp chargen requests.

Windows machines get forcibly update because users didn't use their personal property the way Microsoft wants. How exactly they shoot themselves in the foot is irrelevant, they have every right to do so.

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