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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

There are two aspects of this:

- the ad part that is truly awful. If this indeed happens I can easy understand the rage of users (I have a corporate Windows 10 so I do not see that behaviour)

- the forced restart part: from the perspective of someone working in information security: good job. People do not give a shit about security and when begged to reboot quickly (= within, say, 3 days) they have all kind of important things to do instead for months.

I do not care if their machine is hacked and all their stuff stolen. What I care about is that this machine becomes a part of a bot that is either poses a risk to others (DDoS) or sends out crap (phishing, spam). Such machines should be actively hunted and taken down.

So MS forcing these users to have their PC rebooted even in the middle of their work (after several attempts to have it done by the user) is great.

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Rebooting during working hours, not great at all. Also rebooting without saving the state of the applications opened while the user is working away, not great either. There are reason why security is taking a back seat, business needs are greater than the risk incurred by user bad behaviour.

BTW how is it that Windows 10 still needs more reboot to update any parts of itself, than a regular Linux distro? The update cycle on my Windows 10 machine is maddening compared to my Linux workstation.

It’s really odd that Windows is reboot during working hours. It knows when I’m working, it can detect my habits.

Also; Windows reboots so much probably because of legacy. It was never designed to live reload important components. Why Word needs a reboot, I’ll never know.

Generally, forced reboots caused by applications are due to a need to replace shared components that are in use by background processes.

> Rebooting during working hours, not great at all. Also rebooting without saving the state of the applications opened while the user is working away, not great either. There are reason why security is taking a back seat, business needs are greater than the risk incurred by user bad behaviour.

If you have a company in mind, then whatever they do is their problem. This is called risk management. Security takes a back seat until it does not when there are 400 GB of sensitive data that were stolen and are at sale for 10 M€.

If that company's computers then participate to criminal activities the company should be successfully sued for that. Together with the grandma and families that did not reboot when asked.

> BTW how is it that Windows 10 still needs more reboot to update any parts of itself, than a regular Linux distro? The update cycle on my Windows 10 machine is maddening compared to my Linux workstation.

That's another point. A good point. Every OS has its crapiness, even my beloved Linux that I extensively use since 1994 and still hope, one day, to have on desktop at the quality level of Windows 10.

Unless you're using something like LivePatch, it's a misnomer that Linux (especially Linux on the desktop) doesn't need to reboot--or need to restart so many components that the system might as well reboot--for updates to take effect.

Linux can install most updates without rebooting but updated components won't be used until they are restarted. E.g. if Firefox is updated while it is running, Firefox will need to be restarted (indeed, FF will force you to restart it) for the new version to come into effect. When low-level components (e.g. kernel, libc) are updated, the system must be restarted for these updates to take effect.

Running Linux without periodically rebooting after installing updates is little different from never installing updates at all.

> Rebooting during working hours, not great at all.

Windows has a setting for “active hours” during which it will avoid reboots. It asks about those hours during the initial setup, including a somewhat sane default (0800-1700 IIRC). So reboots during working hours are minimized.

The problem here is that it makes the assumption that rebooting without confirmation outside these hours is a reasonable thing to do. But it isn't.

If I am in the middle of something, and put my laptop to sleep at the end of the day, I absolutely do not expect it to wake up in the small hours, reboot itself, and lose all my work.

The "active hours" is irrelevant. Unconfirmed reboots at any time are completely unacceptable. Look at how MacOS does it. Or Linux updates. Let the user have some modicum of control in scheduling them at their convenience. It's their computer. It's their work. It's their schedule. Computers are supposed to empower us, not enslave us, but it seems increasingly the other way around. They give others control over us.

Counterpoint: iOS will be default reboot at night to install updates. It’s just less noticeable because applications expect that they may get shut down at any time and handle state appropriately. So my take on this is that applications that can not recover state after a restart are broken.

Windows is not iOS. This isn't a counterpoint.

I might be running long-running computations which take several days. I might be performing time-critical data acquisition which is going to run overnight. Hell, I might even just put the system to sleep expecting to pick up in the morning where I left off.

The computer's sole purpose is to perform tasks for me. The software vendors desire to push updates is of lower priority than my own needs. Deciding that it is acceptable to reboot the computer without any acknowledgement or permission from myself is completely and utterly unacceptable. You are correct that applications could be written to restore their state after a reboot. But it's of critical importance to note that:

1) most applications are not written to do this

2) not all application state is restorable

so to do this on Windows is guaranteed to break important workflows. People use Windows for actual important work, and this unscheduled reboot nonsense makes it impossible to rely on the system to function reliably.

EEh good job? Forced restarts with long subsequent boot time, will just drive people to disable Windows Update completely.

Yes. People choose Windows and it brings its share of pleasure and hate. One of these are security updates.

Since rebooting is good for me as a potential victim of these systems - I am happy someone if forcing them to reboot, and should also completely disable the ability to refuse security updates

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