Mmm… meaningless analogies are kind of meaningless?
More like:
If you install a security product that then prevents your car from starting; are they entirely blameless for letting you install it?
If you pull the hood up, tear off the “voids warranty” seal, ignore the “don’t open this” labels, crack the seals open and shove something into the engine… sure.
…but if you just slap a widget with the “vendor approved” sticker on your dash and it bricks your car; that’s a bit sucky right?
I do feel Microsoft is not entirely blameless in this.
It should be easier to recover from this kind of thing.
They should have been paying attention and made a fuss that one of the biggest security vendors has been doing this literally since they started.
I would bet money that until two weeks ago Microsoft was high-5ing them for best security practices.
It’s not “their fault” but they can’t just go “wasn’t us!”.
Before Microsoft comes into the picture the issues is crowdstrike pushing updates without proper testing, selling a product on which customers cannot control the update schedule, and customers for being so naives and not checking what the product they install on critical stuff do.
The big difference is that CS is not the user. In you analogy it's like your car allows you to drive off a cliff, and an (almost) essential part of your car (for example, the pedal) drives the car off a cliff.
It got there because a user or administrator approved and installed it. It didn't just appear there, Microsoft didn't install it there. The user ran it.
Right, so a slightly better analogy would be if you wanted to install a remote starter, but then you find out that they can only be installed into Fords, because other auto manufacturers (Apple, Linux in this case) believe that tampering with the critical path (the engine, kernel) is unsafe. It isn't Ford who's at fault for allowing you to run some random engine modification, it's that mod that is at fault.
More like:
If you install a security product that then prevents your car from starting; are they entirely blameless for letting you install it?
If you pull the hood up, tear off the “voids warranty” seal, ignore the “don’t open this” labels, crack the seals open and shove something into the engine… sure.
…but if you just slap a widget with the “vendor approved” sticker on your dash and it bricks your car; that’s a bit sucky right?
I do feel Microsoft is not entirely blameless in this.
It should be easier to recover from this kind of thing.
They should have been paying attention and made a fuss that one of the biggest security vendors has been doing this literally since they started.
I would bet money that until two weeks ago Microsoft was high-5ing them for best security practices.
It’s not “their fault” but they can’t just go “wasn’t us!”.
It was them.
It wasn’t macOS. It wasn’t *nix.
Suck it up. They should’ve done better.