[64448] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: AOL fixing Microsoft default settings
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Terry Baranski)
Fri Oct 24 00:56:30 2003
From: "Terry Baranski" <tbaranski@mail.com>
To: "'Jared Mauch'" <jared@puck.Nether.net>,
"'Sean Donelan'" <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 00:55:46 -0400
In-Reply-To: <20031024042233.GB20749@puck.nether.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> > How many other ISPs intend to follow AOL's practice and use their
> > connection support software to fix the defaults on their customer's
> > Windows computers?
>
> Sounds good to me. The potential for these users
> to be less-than-educated enough about the existance of
> this "feature" means that the potential for this to
> increase the overall network security is a good thing.
>
> Hopefully they will enable automatic checking and
> downloading of critical software updates as well.
The "without notice" part is perhaps somewhat unsettling. I can
appreciate that attempting to explain this type of change to the AOL
user base would be challenging, but I'd submit that third-party software
making OS changes like this without the user's knowledge could be "thin
ice" territory. Where is the line drawn once this path is chosen?
-Terry
