Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tokenizerrr 3241 days ago
I understand and agree that it's bullshit. But for normal end users it works fine.

And part of me does think that I prefer the majority of the clueless end users to be forced to update. Having to support outdated operating systems and browsers is pretty horrible. And making it harder for botnets to spread is also a pretty good thing.

But yes, there should just be a simple setting. Sadly there isn't so we're left to resorting to shitty workarounds.

2 comments

> And part of me does think that I prefer the majority of the clueless end users to be forced to update. Having to support outdated operating systems and browsers is pretty horrible. And making it harder for botnets to spread is also a pretty good thing.

So make it updatable without a system reboot? Why does Windows need to reboot for standard security updates? Hell, most times when Windows says I need to reboot, simply restarting the service(s) that have been updated accomplishes the same thing.

It's not like Microsoft doesn't have control over the entire codebase. Unix applies security patches all the time without restarting, and has for a decade. Why can't MS make this work? TBH, to me it feels like good old laziness. A system reboot has been the go-to to address Windows' lack of stability and quality since freaking 3.1. Reboot reboot reboot, that's all MS ever has for a solution.

> So make it updatable without a system reboot?

Even better, solve the problem Apple solved 5 years ago and make reboots seamlessly return to the pre-reboot state (or at least try).

I've been impressed with that actually, works very well.
But realistically the clueless "normal" end users who should update automatically don't know about group policies and aren't going to use them, not even by mistake.
You'd be surprised. A user who is annoyed at their computer shutting off while they're gaming because they kept it on for a few days will Google. Find some instructions and blindly follows them. Then they forget about that because they went back to their game. Fast forward a few months and their computer is part of a botnet and we're all worse off.
^ Exactly. If you don't make it user friendly, especially Windows users will track down a user-unfriendly way to do whatever they feel they need to do. Now you've got end users playing in your registry and group policy, to accomplish a thing that should've been doable with a dropdown select.
I used to regularly see advice shared around that if you got an SSL warning in Chrome when trying to visit Facebook, to just type "DANGER" in the keyboard, and everything would work again. I believe Google changed the workaround after a while because it was never intended to be used as a way for people to dismiss critical warnings without any real understanding of the risks.
I believe they changed the keyword to "badidea".