Microsoft To Disable Autorun

jchrisos writes "Microsoft is planning to disable autorun in the next Release Candidate of Windows 7 and future updates to Windows XP and Vista. In order to maintain a 'balance between security and usability,' non-writable media will maintain its current behavior however. In any case, if it means no more autorun on flash drives, removable hard drives and network shares, that is definitely a step in the right direction. Will be interesting to see what malware creators do to get around this ..."

Comments

Re:Erm.....What the hell?

[TopSpin]

Why wasn't this the default to begin with?

*You.

You had Microsoft convinced that you felt burdened by having to explicitly command your machine to act on media. Microsoft believed you perceived operating systems that failed to automatically engage new media as somehow less sophisticated or friendly. You complained when required to perform any number of minor steps to begin utilizing your media, and you were happy when arbitrary programs were automatically launched to consume arbitrary content with no effort on your part.

You had to be dragged over the coals of malware to learn that this naivety is painful. You had to be fleeced by keyloggers and had your careers ruined by worms. Billions had to be pissed away before you got it. Now that you appear to have acquired clues sufficient to overcome your obstinacy, Microsoft now perceives that you will not throw a fit when inserting a flash drive doesn't automatically launch hundreds of megs of software. Congratulations!

* Those of you that put in the effort to discover, document and apply the various registry hacks, group policy modifications and other various and sundry non-default bullshit to prevent autorun are excluded, of course. Those of you who propagated this insanity to the Gnome/KDE/et al. environments can eat a dick. Get busy and take it out (for read-only media as well, thank you) now that you've been shown the way by the only influence you appear to recognize.