Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.

I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.

And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.

Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.

All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.

View on HN

Security and upselling are orthogonal; I can make a secure operating system that doesn’t notify the user of OneDrive, iCloud, and other services.

Things get more nuanced when we talk about other types of notifications and about whether updates should be automatic or always require a user’s explicit consent. I personally believe that a key tenet of personal computing is that the owner of the computer, not the hardware or software vendor, should have full control over the hardware and software on the computer. This control is undermined when systems are designed in ways to give users less control. There may be legitimate security benefits to mandatory automatic updates, for example, but there are risks, such as buggy updates leading to broken installations or even lost data, and there’s also having to deal with unwanted UI/UX changes.

As a power user, developer, and researcher, I want control over my computing environment. Unfortunately Windows and macOS have been trending toward more paternalism, more nagging, and more upselling. Thankfully Linux exists, but at the cost of needing to switch away from convenient proprietary software tools like Microsoft Office. I can do without Word or Excel, but PowerPoint is what keeps me on Office (I’ve tried LibreOffice and the Beamer LaTeX template). I’m also concerned about hardware getting increasingly locked down, which will hurt Linux.

I had the same reading, it sounded like Windows is worse now than Windows 95, which would be a hot take indeed. But it seems the intent was purely on these nagging aspects which have definitely gotten worse.

It might be easier to swallow the message focusing on Windows 8+ when it really jumped the shark. Windows 7 was a pretty good OS holistically I think even if there are aspects lost compared to the pure simplicity of those really old ones.

You haven't addressed OP argument.

The fact there were security concerns is unrelated with the MAIN points discussed not only in the post, but in OP's reply:

> No upselling services

> No automatic updates

> No nagging.

> No automatic updates

Without auto-updates you could take a guess how many systems wouldn't get patched in months.

I know it goes against the grain here; but so what. It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish. Nag for security updates, sure. But automatic updates of anything is user hostile and should be abolished. Especially when those automatic updates remove features or introduce a shit ton of new bugs.

Problem is the history o people failing to patch causing widespread Internet outages, such as via SQL Slammer; a SQL Server patch had been available for six months to protect against the vulnerability. Microsoft learned the lesson that users, even the “professional” ones that should know better, fail to patch, which brings us to the current automated patch situation.

> It's the users prerogative to do with their device, what the wish.

The problem is, users are still part of the Internet. And historically, users haven't taken care about update nags, that's how we ended up with giant ass botnets.

It is not really gone - at all.

The size of the botnets and raw bandwidth they have access to now is staggering. (DDoS, "Residential Proxies", ”Anti-Censorship VPNs”, etc. All just compromised residential devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com