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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 ..."
CD is read-only, thus not applicable.
It's been a long time.
If I insert a CD with autorun files on it or it has an autorun folder, I am prompted that this disc has software on it designed to run automatically, and I am asked what I would like to do about it.
That's what Vista does too... I actually really like that behavior. It's almost as convenient as autoplay is, but without the security risk. (Well, for good users.)
This is exactly what Vista does. The problem is that you can customize the icon for the "run" operation, and malware authors got clever and used the folder icon. If you weren't paying attention, you might click the wrong option and install the malware (although there's also a UAC prompt to get through on Vista).
Those U3 enabled flash drives will STILL autorun. The second partition is made to appear to be a cdrom to windows, which means that windows will still autorun the crap they put on there.
Not only that, but this will give sandisk a semi-legit reason to partitions those bloody things. To this day, the ONLY way to get rid of that damn partition is using a windows utility, and that doesn't even work half the time!
As someone who likes autorun, my reaction to this is "yeah, because I like doing work myself that a computer is good at".
I think Vista's "always autoplay, never autorun" (if I got those names right) scheme works really well.
Autorun does work really well... at installing rootkits on your machine from Sony/BMG CD's.
In Vista you can go: Press Start button, type "word", hit enter. And you open MS Word using a CLI-like interface.
This all happens as fast as I type. S is safari, F is firefox, m is mail, p-space-s is photoshop, t-space-m is textmate etc...
Who still uses the dock??
And serious kudos to Microsoft for turning off autorun- that blesses me.