North American Network Operators Group
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RE: AOL fixing Microsoft default settings

  • From: Terry Baranski
  • Date: Fri Oct 24 00:57:51 2003 
> > How many other ISPs intend to follow AOL's practice and use their
> > connection support software to fix the defaults on their customer's
> > Windows computers?
> 
> 	Sounds good to me.  The potential for these users
> to be less-than-educated enough about the existance of
> this "feature" means that the potential for this to
> increase the overall network security is a good thing.
> 
> 	Hopefully they will enable automatic checking and
> downloading of critical software updates as well.

The "without notice" part is perhaps somewhat unsettling.  I can
appreciate that attempting to explain this type of change to the AOL
user base would be challenging, but I'd submit that third-party software
making OS changes like this without the user's knowledge could be "thin
ice" territory.  Where is the line drawn once this path is chosen?  

-Terry