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Which users?

Absolutely 10th Jul 2007

If Microsoft set the 'deny by default, allow by exception' rule, idiot users would scream bloody murder when they installed the firewall and nothing worked by default.

That task would be the job of administrators in a business, and residential home users who don't want to learn the work of sysadmin to send our emails to relatives and buy airline tickets. "Idiot" users, in a business environment, would not be responsible for such configuration problems, so I guess you're not talking about business users at all here.

Nothing new in this logic -- some organizations make everyone a member of the "Administrators" (or heaven forbid, "Domain Administrators") group to give them easy access to everything. Usually the trick of a lazy or ignorant admin.

I agree. Why is Microsoft programming to make their jobs easier at the expense of safety, instead of programming on the assumption that admins are informed & industrious, ie that the person logged in as admin is legitimate, either as the administrator of the computer in a business, or the owner of it in a home?

In any case -- it is a no-win situation for them. If they made things too tight out of the box, they'd have tens of millions of complaints because nothing works -- if they do it as they have done -- they get millions of complaints because it is insecure by default. No way to make everyone happy.

I disagree. I think catering to lazy & ignorant sysadmins is Microsoft's #1 user satisfaction problem. For legitimate home users, "hiding" important configuration options in the labyrinthine registry defeats the purpose of a GUI. Your point about lazy & ignorant admins is accurate, but Microsoft's workaround extends to legitimate purchasers of Windows the assumption that the person using the software is a disgruntled cubicle zombie and shouldn't have control over our own computers. As a former customer of Microsoft products in my home, I found that offensive enough to learn my way around Linux. If the prices were comparable I'd have just bought a Mac, but by the time Apple's prices dropped to the range of Microsoft, I had already invested so much time learning Linux that now the cost of an Apple will also not be attractive to me any time soon.