The challenge here is that many people will continue to make this defeatist argument until something very, very bad happens, because most people are not good at evaluating the risk from rare but extremely damaging events. Regulators should be stepping in to control the world of the auto manufacturers until they get their house in order on this one, because unfortunately, unlike most of the security theatre we see in the modern world, mass casualties due to compromised auto software is actually a credible risk that we really shouldn't accept so casually.
There is nothing extreme about my example. The robustness or otherwise of car headlights is a recurring issue here in the UK these days, not least because of many local councils' obsessions with speed bumps.
And my current car has neither auto-levelling nor turning, being slightly before either was added to the model I have, so your argument about "intellectual dishonesty" is just... Well, I don't even know what those words are supposed to mean, other than the person writing them is trying to sound clever, but in any case there's nothing dishonest about what I wrote as it's all objectively correct.
It's also true that modern cars are more efficient and in some respects more reliable than older ones, but the downside is that when they do go wrong, it tends to be catastrophic failure that requires an entire component or system swapping out. It's not just little things like headlights. It's also all the sensors that support all this clever new technology, and they most certainly can and do go wrong, and the replacements for those cost a lot more than a headlight bulb. We've replaced mechanical faults with electrical ones that require more skill and more equipment and much more expensive parts to fix.
We're also introducing a whole new class of faults, because the quality of the software in many modern cars is shocking, and for exactly the reasons this discussion was started, that's a big problem. We have both incompetence and malice to worry about, but with the car companies going to great lengths to lock up their software against inspection and adjustment, there is essentially nothing anyone else can legally do to repair or protect the vehicle even if a software flaw is clearly identified.
Time required to change headlight bulb in my car 15 years ago: 1-2 minutes.
Time required to change headlight bulb in my current car: usually faster to drop by the dealer, because they seem to know a shortcut for doing it without disassembling the entire front of the car per the handbook and have whatever tools they need to take that shortcut.
Time required to change headlight bulb in next generation car with state-of-the-art lighting: it's not one headlight bulb, it's a whole assembly with multiple lighting components, associated sensors, and software. And you'll be needing a mortgage if it ever goes wrong.
Also, MTBF for headlight bulbs in my car 15 years ago was probably 2-3 years, while for my current car it's probably under a year despite all the claims that bulbs in modern cars should last the lifetime of the vehicle. $DEITY help the poor schmuck who gets a shiny new executive car with the cool new lighting technologies if those lights are similarly unreliable, though.
Do I think it should be easier to configure a cloud deployment? Probably.
Do I think it actually is, based on real life experience of seeing people try to do both? Not even close.
I think the ease of deployment of cloud services is one of the great IT lies of our generation, but so many people have bet on it now that it's very hard for them to acknowledge that not everything has worked out as idyllic as it was supposed to be according to the brochure. As the saying goes, it's hard to accept something as the truth when your salary depends on it being false.
I'm guessing the GP's point was that people keep saying the cloud should be more secure and reliable for most organisations, but the evidence to support that is looking more sketchy almost by the day and the critics are starting to say "I told you so".
Pretty much all the major cloud infrastructure providers have had major outages. Plenty of business-critical software-as-a-service providers have had major outages, privacy leaks, data loss, and so on. Some services have been discontinued. Some prices have been hiked. Some services have been changed in ways that made them less useful for certain customers as the service developed, and maybe their customers then found their data is effectively locked in as well.
Perhaps most telling, quite a few small/medium businesses have suffered unnecessary outages because they hadn't configured their cloud-based systems properly. It's all very well saying that your Amazon-hosted services could have been robust against the data centre flooding if you'd just set option 17A to distribute the back-ups across multiple sub-sites of your logical cluster in the relevant geographical region of your continental group, but the fact is, people thought they were resilient using the cloud and their systems still failed. At this point, I don't think it's credible any more to argue that in-house systems will fail due to lack of expertise but that complicated cloud-hosted deployments will magically work when set up by the same level of staff.
Most of the UIs in Creative Suite/Cloud applications are pretty bad, but it's the features that count as much as anything.
For example, look at popular FOSS tools like the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. How well do they support CMYK images? Serious typography with OpenType fonts? Professional colour books for the spot colour in your client's logo?
If you want to create work that looks like it was designed with WordArt from the early '90s, I'm sure this stuff is great. If you need to produce a professional quality magazine ad to the publisher's specs or professional quality graphics for a client's new web site, not so much.
Yes, there is trust involved, and Microsoft have been straining that trust recently with some of the updates they've pushed out.
Even so, actively misrepresenting an update as you described in order to get spyware installed would be a good way to alienate large parts of the business community, attract the attention of government privacy regulators here in Europe, find yourself on the wrong end of lawsuits and/or regulatory investigations, and potentially even find your staff criminally liable for unauthorised access to computer systems if the authorities wanted to make a point.
I personally don't like Microsoft's new corporate strategy, and that's why I've chosen not to switch to Windows 10, but I don't think they are stupid enough to deliberately pull the kind of bait-and-switch you described. There are far too many ways it ends very badly for them in PR, regulatory, legal and financial terms.
Please note that I didn't propose any such equivalence. I'm not familiar with the background to the riot and make no judgements about it here.
However, to give one obvious category of ethically dubious systems coming out of the Valley, building systems that effectively turn humans into spies to report on their friends and family is shady as hell in itself, and if you don't think government monitoring of that information and in some cases harmful actions also follow then I know a Nigerian prince with a great deal for you.
As for how the businesses themselves are run, take a look at how the employees of a typical start-up are treated, or quite a few of the big name companies as well, and tell me about respecting rights and intellectual freedom.
Yes, we absolutely should push for higher ethical standards in technology, but some of that starts at home in our own tech industries. Many, many businesses in those industries have been normalising systematic abuse of both their users and their staff on a wide scale for years.
The letter urges Silicon Valley leaders to be mindful of their corporate responsibility and ensure that Mr. Modi's Digital India project promotes transparency, protection of human rights and civil liberties and intellectual freedom.
To be fair, it would be nice if Silicon Valley leaders themselves cared a bit more about those things, too. The start-up, VC-driven culture in the Valley isn't exactly known for its nuanced interpretation of things like privacy, security, and honesty with customers about where things are going and how much of what they're buying into will still be there later.
The original Ars Technica article there actually found very little troubling behaviour once the privacy settings were turned on. But yes, we should question the odd remaining instances they did find, particularly the upload with unidentified content.
In many parts of the world, the majority of people don't need to use tax software or "do their taxes". For example, here in the UK many basic taxes are deducted at source and then reported and paid by the employer/merchant/bank, so many people never have to file a return at all. Those who do typically use an on-line system provided by the tax authority or work with a professional accountant who can then file on their behalf. None of these people needs to run the kind of tax software you mentioned on their own computer.
Also, your stereotypes about gamers are way out of date. For example, the ESA's 2014 report suggests that interest in entertainment software is roughly equal between the sexes.
They've already gone further with Java, Silverlight, and anything else that relied on NPAPI. As of this update, these technologies will no longer work, even if they worked just fine a few months ago on some site or app you find useful and they still worked last week if you flicked a hidden option back on. Yay for mandatory updates, I guess.
It seems to me that Windows 10 moves some things forward if you have the right kinds of device to take advantage of it, but suffers from trying to treat widely differing kinds of device used for widely differing purposes as if they should all work the same way.
Incidentally, articles like this one by David Pogue are exactly the kind of thing I was mocking before, and I stand by that mockery. He summed up his own position quite neatly with this:
If you’re a PC veteran, then you’ll recognize Windows 10: It’s pretty much Windows 7, with Cortana, nicer typography, and a few new features.
Those new features seem to be at best hit-or-miss, though arguments for why he thinks they are good are rather few. He glosses over the privacy, security, stability and reliability concerns, despite these alone being reason enough for significant numbers of people not to upgrade. And he literally wrote that the best thing about it is that it's free. (So is sticking with the Windows 7 already running on my boxes, by the way.)
The world is too big for personal anecdotes to be reliable in this context. None of us have a personal social circle that is a good representation of the general population in all things. That's why I was looking at industry-wide data: following the money is a neutral indicator.
closed source == who knows what the heck it's doing?
Wireshark does, for a start.
The other question we should be asking in the context of Windows 10 is what it could do in the future, now that it has a mandatory update mechanism, given the various provisions as currently written in the EULA/privacy policy/etc.
Unless you're running Enterprise, it's not disabled and still spying on literally everything, including sending sound from the mic to Microsoft. I was going to list some links but I'm at work and don't have time. A little searching will show you the truth.
Perhaps you should do a little searching yourself. Perpetuating this sort of ill-informed FUD really isn't helping.
There are legitimate privacy concerns about Windows 10. There are also reasons for some of the behaviour, and settings that do turn some of the behaviour off. What we need to further this debate is facts, not hyperbole.
I do find the positive reviews of Windows 10 in a lot of popular media slightly confusing. The pattern always seems much the same:
It's free. It's better than Windows 8. It has some new features, but you probably won't use them. (Little if any recognition of any privacy, security, reliability or stability concerns.) BEST OPERATION SYSTEM EVERZ 11/10 UPGRADE NOW LOOKS UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS!!!!11!eleven!
I can understand mainstream media not being particularly technically literate, but how does anyone qualified to write a professional review plug things like being free and not as bad as the immediate predecessor that most people never bought as solid reasons to upgrade immediately? How do they not do one Google search and at least acknowledge that there have been some serious problems in the first few weeks even if they then argue that they're teething troubles and they believe Microsoft will fix them?
I've been reassured that in the last week or two, I have at least also seen a few more balanced reviews acknowledging the problems and suggesting that it might be worth waiting to see how things go rather than installing right now. But even there, a disturbing number of professional IT reporters seem to be casually dismissing things like security or privacy risks that they don't seem to fully understand themselves or conflating important security updates with general patching and moving around of the software without questioning whether Microsoft's approach here is really in users' interests.
Why? Aside from the widely publicised problems, what actual positive things does 10 offer that previous versions didn't?
Cortana, like all the other personal assistant gadgets of recent years, seems very clever at first sight. However, I've seen little evidence so far suggesting that real users want this sort of tool or find these tools work well for them.
Edge seems to be unfinished and to have negligible adoption rates so far. This might change in time, but for now it seems to lack both the stability and reliability of IE and the flexibility and new features of Chrome or Firefox. It's not clear yet what, if anything, it will offer beyond these existing browsers to encourage users to switch.
DX12 is a gaming platform that so far has little support from either hardware or games. Again, this might change in time, but historically new versions of DX that were locked to new versions of Windows haven't been the driver for adoption that Microsoft might have hoped and in practice games have continued to support older versions of DirectX as well.
There are a few UI changes in Windows 10, but the positive comments about several of them seem closer to "this isn't as bad as Win 8" than "hey, this is actually useful". Other UI changes, such as splitting up configuration settings into lots of different places, are getting quite negative comments so far. So again, overall I don't see the UI being an advantage over other contemporary operating systems that might encourage people to switch.
So really, what is the killer feature of Windows 10 that would make a normal but well-informed user decide to install it on, say, an existing Windows 7 machine?
For businesses, sure. For private individuals, gaming is one of the main blockers for migration to other systems today, and it seems reasonable to assume that this one affects many, many more people than tax software. After all, which of (a) the PC gaming industry and (b) the PC personal taxation software industry makes so much money that even Hollywood is jealous?
You make a good point, but it applies beyond healthcare too.
May I introduce you to the auto industry? They'd like to sell you a new car that is always on-line, accepts OTA updates, and runs the safety-critical vehicle control systems on the same bus as the infotainment controls. What could possibly go wrong? (It's ironic that among the reports of hacks and abuses over recent months, there was also a report suggesting that many customers didn't use or actively didn't want a lot of these new electronic gadgets in their vehicles anyway. The only developments that almost everyone seemed to support were the directly safety-related driver aids.)
Then we have the financial and insurance industries, whose only requirement for any software they make sometimes seems to be "minimise fraud". Obviously that's an important commercial requirement, but meanwhile, they still can't reliably do basic things like sending money from person A to person B, providing secure and usable on-line banking facilities, providing working IT for their in-branch staff, or sometimes even keeping accurate records of who is authorised to access an account or facility.
We could call the licensed programmers "Software Engineers", and have it actually be true.
The trouble is, it wouldn't be, because we're probably still several decades away from the kind of maturity and evidence base we'd need in the industry to actually do software development as a true engineering discipline. It's a laudable goal, but we don't know how to do it yet.
The good thing is that licensed professionals have to adhere to professional standards or become liable.
The problem is who sets those standards.
No-one knows how to write perfect software, because there is no such thing. Even with technically perfect implementation, there are always questions of requirements and design where at some point the specification of what you need isn't in a neat, unambiguous, technical form.
Very few people in the world know how to write highly robust and secure software, and the cost of doing so is often high. A few more people are exploring various potentially better ways of doing things, which might improve the situation in the long term, but for now there isn't a large and reliable body of evidence to support most of these ideas. Crucially, in many cases today, even skilled and diligent professionals who will all do good work may genuinely disagree about which tools and techniques they prefer to use and why.
Regulation and licensing would most likely be based on "best practices" determined by some central organisation, but there is a tiny pool of candidates who are even remotely qualified to make such judgements and a tiny body of evidence to support it. Realistically, that means the people settings the standards probably won't be the real experts, such as they are. No, the regulators will more likely be people like those consultants who sell a different trendy methodology every few years, and the idea of giving those vacuous salespeople a louder voice than already have and actual legal powers over how other professionals develop software is more terrifying than any bug.
Sure, but prior to Windows 10 you could have declined that update as well or uninstalled it afterwards if you decided you didn't want it. Even in the worst case, you could presumably have reinstalled Windows and not reapplied that particular update the second time around.
Slashdot Mirror
The challenge here is that many people will continue to make this defeatist argument until something very, very bad happens, because most people are not good at evaluating the risk from rare but extremely damaging events. Regulators should be stepping in to control the world of the auto manufacturers until they get their house in order on this one, because unfortunately, unlike most of the security theatre we see in the modern world, mass casualties due to compromised auto software is actually a credible risk that we really shouldn't accept so casually.
There is nothing extreme about my example. The robustness or otherwise of car headlights is a recurring issue here in the UK these days, not least because of many local councils' obsessions with speed bumps.
And my current car has neither auto-levelling nor turning, being slightly before either was added to the model I have, so your argument about "intellectual dishonesty" is just... Well, I don't even know what those words are supposed to mean, other than the person writing them is trying to sound clever, but in any case there's nothing dishonest about what I wrote as it's all objectively correct.
It's also true that modern cars are more efficient and in some respects more reliable than older ones, but the downside is that when they do go wrong, it tends to be catastrophic failure that requires an entire component or system swapping out. It's not just little things like headlights. It's also all the sensors that support all this clever new technology, and they most certainly can and do go wrong, and the replacements for those cost a lot more than a headlight bulb. We've replaced mechanical faults with electrical ones that require more skill and more equipment and much more expensive parts to fix.
We're also introducing a whole new class of faults, because the quality of the software in many modern cars is shocking, and for exactly the reasons this discussion was started, that's a big problem. We have both incompetence and malice to worry about, but with the car companies going to great lengths to lock up their software against inspection and adjustment, there is essentially nothing anyone else can legally do to repair or protect the vehicle even if a software flaw is clearly identified.
Which part of "per the handbook" didn't you understand?
I wish that were all true, but...
Time required to change headlight bulb in my car 15 years ago: 1-2 minutes.
Time required to change headlight bulb in my current car: usually faster to drop by the dealer, because they seem to know a shortcut for doing it without disassembling the entire front of the car per the handbook and have whatever tools they need to take that shortcut.
Time required to change headlight bulb in next generation car with state-of-the-art lighting: it's not one headlight bulb, it's a whole assembly with multiple lighting components, associated sensors, and software. And you'll be needing a mortgage if it ever goes wrong.
Also, MTBF for headlight bulbs in my car 15 years ago was probably 2-3 years, while for my current car it's probably under a year despite all the claims that bulbs in modern cars should last the lifetime of the vehicle. $DEITY help the poor schmuck who gets a shiny new executive car with the cool new lighting technologies if those lights are similarly unreliable, though.
Do I think it should be easier to configure a cloud deployment? Probably.
Do I think it actually is, based on real life experience of seeing people try to do both? Not even close.
I think the ease of deployment of cloud services is one of the great IT lies of our generation, but so many people have bet on it now that it's very hard for them to acknowledge that not everything has worked out as idyllic as it was supposed to be according to the brochure. As the saying goes, it's hard to accept something as the truth when your salary depends on it being false.
I'm guessing the GP's point was that people keep saying the cloud should be more secure and reliable for most organisations, but the evidence to support that is looking more sketchy almost by the day and the critics are starting to say "I told you so".
Pretty much all the major cloud infrastructure providers have had major outages. Plenty of business-critical software-as-a-service providers have had major outages, privacy leaks, data loss, and so on. Some services have been discontinued. Some prices have been hiked. Some services have been changed in ways that made them less useful for certain customers as the service developed, and maybe their customers then found their data is effectively locked in as well.
Perhaps most telling, quite a few small/medium businesses have suffered unnecessary outages because they hadn't configured their cloud-based systems properly. It's all very well saying that your Amazon-hosted services could have been robust against the data centre flooding if you'd just set option 17A to distribute the back-ups across multiple sub-sites of your logical cluster in the relevant geographical region of your continental group, but the fact is, people thought they were resilient using the cloud and their systems still failed. At this point, I don't think it's credible any more to argue that in-house systems will fail due to lack of expertise but that complicated cloud-hosted deployments will magically work when set up by the same level of staff.
Most of the UIs in Creative Suite/Cloud applications are pretty bad, but it's the features that count as much as anything.
For example, look at popular FOSS tools like the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. How well do they support CMYK images? Serious typography with OpenType fonts? Professional colour books for the spot colour in your client's logo?
If you want to create work that looks like it was designed with WordArt from the early '90s, I'm sure this stuff is great. If you need to produce a professional quality magazine ad to the publisher's specs or professional quality graphics for a client's new web site, not so much.
Yes, there is trust involved, and Microsoft have been straining that trust recently with some of the updates they've pushed out.
Even so, actively misrepresenting an update as you described in order to get spyware installed would be a good way to alienate large parts of the business community, attract the attention of government privacy regulators here in Europe, find yourself on the wrong end of lawsuits and/or regulatory investigations, and potentially even find your staff criminally liable for unauthorised access to computer systems if the authorities wanted to make a point.
I personally don't like Microsoft's new corporate strategy, and that's why I've chosen not to switch to Windows 10, but I don't think they are stupid enough to deliberately pull the kind of bait-and-switch you described. There are far too many ways it ends very badly for them in PR, regulatory, legal and financial terms.
There, fixed it for you, since they're backporting all the shit people hate about Windows 10 to the previous OSes.
Isn't it lucky that as a Windows 7 user I can just choose not to install those updates, then?
Please note that I didn't propose any such equivalence. I'm not familiar with the background to the riot and make no judgements about it here.
However, to give one obvious category of ethically dubious systems coming out of the Valley, building systems that effectively turn humans into spies to report on their friends and family is shady as hell in itself, and if you don't think government monitoring of that information and in some cases harmful actions also follow then I know a Nigerian prince with a great deal for you.
As for how the businesses themselves are run, take a look at how the employees of a typical start-up are treated, or quite a few of the big name companies as well, and tell me about respecting rights and intellectual freedom.
Yes, we absolutely should push for higher ethical standards in technology, but some of that starts at home in our own tech industries. Many, many businesses in those industries have been normalising systematic abuse of both their users and their staff on a wide scale for years.
The letter urges Silicon Valley leaders to be mindful of their corporate responsibility and ensure that Mr. Modi's Digital India project promotes transparency, protection of human rights and civil liberties and intellectual freedom.
To be fair, it would be nice if Silicon Valley leaders themselves cared a bit more about those things, too. The start-up, VC-driven culture in the Valley isn't exactly known for its nuanced interpretation of things like privacy, security, and honesty with customers about where things are going and how much of what they're buying into will still be there later.
The original Ars Technica article there actually found very little troubling behaviour once the privacy settings were turned on. But yes, we should question the odd remaining instances they did find, particularly the upload with unidentified content.
Your bias is showing.
In many parts of the world, the majority of people don't need to use tax software or "do their taxes". For example, here in the UK many basic taxes are deducted at source and then reported and paid by the employer/merchant/bank, so many people never have to file a return at all. Those who do typically use an on-line system provided by the tax authority or work with a professional accountant who can then file on their behalf. None of these people needs to run the kind of tax software you mentioned on their own computer.
Also, your stereotypes about gamers are way out of date. For example, the ESA's 2014 report suggests that interest in entertainment software is roughly equal between the sexes.
Why only Flash?
They've already gone further with Java, Silverlight, and anything else that relied on NPAPI. As of this update, these technologies will no longer work, even if they worked just fine a few months ago on some site or app you find useful and they still worked last week if you flicked a hidden option back on. Yay for mandatory updates, I guess.
It seems to me that Windows 10 moves some things forward if you have the right kinds of device to take advantage of it, but suffers from trying to treat widely differing kinds of device used for widely differing purposes as if they should all work the same way.
Incidentally, articles like this one by David Pogue are exactly the kind of thing I was mocking before, and I stand by that mockery. He summed up his own position quite neatly with this:
If you’re a PC veteran, then you’ll recognize Windows 10: It’s pretty much Windows 7, with Cortana, nicer typography, and a few new features.
Those new features seem to be at best hit-or-miss, though arguments for why he thinks they are good are rather few. He glosses over the privacy, security, stability and reliability concerns, despite these alone being reason enough for significant numbers of people not to upgrade. And he literally wrote that the best thing about it is that it's free. (So is sticking with the Windows 7 already running on my boxes, by the way.)
The world is too big for personal anecdotes to be reliable in this context. None of us have a personal social circle that is a good representation of the general population in all things. That's why I was looking at industry-wide data: following the money is a neutral indicator.
closed source == who knows what the heck it's doing?
Wireshark does, for a start.
The other question we should be asking in the context of Windows 10 is what it could do in the future, now that it has a mandatory update mechanism, given the various provisions as currently written in the EULA/privacy policy/etc.
Unless you're running Enterprise, it's not disabled and still spying on literally everything, including sending sound from the mic to Microsoft. I was going to list some links but I'm at work and don't have time. A little searching will show you the truth.
Perhaps you should do a little searching yourself. Perpetuating this sort of ill-informed FUD really isn't helping.
There are legitimate privacy concerns about Windows 10. There are also reasons for some of the behaviour, and settings that do turn some of the behaviour off. What we need to further this debate is facts, not hyperbole.
I do find the positive reviews of Windows 10 in a lot of popular media slightly confusing. The pattern always seems much the same:
It's free. It's better than Windows 8. It has some new features, but you probably won't use them. (Little if any recognition of any privacy, security, reliability or stability concerns.) BEST OPERATION SYSTEM EVERZ 11/10 UPGRADE NOW LOOKS UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS!!!!11!eleven!
I can understand mainstream media not being particularly technically literate, but how does anyone qualified to write a professional review plug things like being free and not as bad as the immediate predecessor that most people never bought as solid reasons to upgrade immediately? How do they not do one Google search and at least acknowledge that there have been some serious problems in the first few weeks even if they then argue that they're teething troubles and they believe Microsoft will fix them?
I've been reassured that in the last week or two, I have at least also seen a few more balanced reviews acknowledging the problems and suggesting that it might be worth waiting to see how things go rather than installing right now. But even there, a disturbing number of professional IT reporters seem to be casually dismissing things like security or privacy risks that they don't seem to fully understand themselves or conflating important security updates with general patching and moving around of the software without questioning whether Microsoft's approach here is really in users' interests.
10 is going to be big.
Why? Aside from the widely publicised problems, what actual positive things does 10 offer that previous versions didn't?
Cortana, like all the other personal assistant gadgets of recent years, seems very clever at first sight. However, I've seen little evidence so far suggesting that real users want this sort of tool or find these tools work well for them.
Edge seems to be unfinished and to have negligible adoption rates so far. This might change in time, but for now it seems to lack both the stability and reliability of IE and the flexibility and new features of Chrome or Firefox. It's not clear yet what, if anything, it will offer beyond these existing browsers to encourage users to switch.
DX12 is a gaming platform that so far has little support from either hardware or games. Again, this might change in time, but historically new versions of DX that were locked to new versions of Windows haven't been the driver for adoption that Microsoft might have hoped and in practice games have continued to support older versions of DirectX as well.
There are a few UI changes in Windows 10, but the positive comments about several of them seem closer to "this isn't as bad as Win 8" than "hey, this is actually useful". Other UI changes, such as splitting up configuration settings into lots of different places, are getting quite negative comments so far. So again, overall I don't see the UI being an advantage over other contemporary operating systems that might encourage people to switch.
So really, what is the killer feature of Windows 10 that would make a normal but well-informed user decide to install it on, say, an existing Windows 7 machine?
For businesses, sure. For private individuals, gaming is one of the main blockers for migration to other systems today, and it seems reasonable to assume that this one affects many, many more people than tax software. After all, which of (a) the PC gaming industry and (b) the PC personal taxation software industry makes so much money that even Hollywood is jealous?
You make a good point, but it applies beyond healthcare too.
May I introduce you to the auto industry? They'd like to sell you a new car that is always on-line, accepts OTA updates, and runs the safety-critical vehicle control systems on the same bus as the infotainment controls. What could possibly go wrong? (It's ironic that among the reports of hacks and abuses over recent months, there was also a report suggesting that many customers didn't use or actively didn't want a lot of these new electronic gadgets in their vehicles anyway. The only developments that almost everyone seemed to support were the directly safety-related driver aids.)
Then we have the financial and insurance industries, whose only requirement for any software they make sometimes seems to be "minimise fraud". Obviously that's an important commercial requirement, but meanwhile, they still can't reliably do basic things like sending money from person A to person B, providing secure and usable on-line banking facilities, providing working IT for their in-branch staff, or sometimes even keeping accurate records of who is authorised to access an account or facility.
We could call the licensed programmers "Software Engineers", and have it actually be true.
The trouble is, it wouldn't be, because we're probably still several decades away from the kind of maturity and evidence base we'd need in the industry to actually do software development as a true engineering discipline. It's a laudable goal, but we don't know how to do it yet.
The good thing is that licensed professionals have to adhere to professional standards or become liable.
The problem is who sets those standards.
No-one knows how to write perfect software, because there is no such thing. Even with technically perfect implementation, there are always questions of requirements and design where at some point the specification of what you need isn't in a neat, unambiguous, technical form.
Very few people in the world know how to write highly robust and secure software, and the cost of doing so is often high. A few more people are exploring various potentially better ways of doing things, which might improve the situation in the long term, but for now there isn't a large and reliable body of evidence to support most of these ideas. Crucially, in many cases today, even skilled and diligent professionals who will all do good work may genuinely disagree about which tools and techniques they prefer to use and why.
Regulation and licensing would most likely be based on "best practices" determined by some central organisation, but there is a tiny pool of candidates who are even remotely qualified to make such judgements and a tiny body of evidence to support it. Realistically, that means the people settings the standards probably won't be the real experts, such as they are. No, the regulators will more likely be people like those consultants who sell a different trendy methodology every few years, and the idea of giving those vacuous salespeople a louder voice than already have and actual legal powers over how other professionals develop software is more terrifying than any bug.
Sure, but prior to Windows 10 you could have declined that update as well or uninstalled it afterwards if you decided you didn't want it. Even in the worst case, you could presumably have reinstalled Windows and not reapplied that particular update the second time around.