Hacker News Reader

Comment by DASD | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that Smartscreen is on by default. Most users are going to have trouble enough trying to forget about the missing Start Menu even after watching the Welcome Intro let alone fumble through looking for some way to disable this option.

Malware protection requiring surrendered privacy seems a pretty crappy "feature." Why can't Microsoft do better?

View on HN

How? By constantly downloading the entire database of every application to your local drive? Where it would not only take up space, but could be modified to allow anything in? The author says nothing about _what_ exactly is being sent to MS, all he can say for sure that a request is sent to that URL. And about it being turned on by default - as long as it can be turned off, this is _good_. The main problem with security features (like Windows Update for a long time) that are not turned on by default is that your regular Joe user will never turn those on, thus ending up with a terribly out of date, insecure system.

How? By constantly downloading the entire database of every application to your local drive? Where it would not only take up space, but could be modified to allow anything in?

Yes, and no.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427416

(besides, if you can just tamper with the filesystem you're kinda in already)

Most users are going to have trouble enough trying to forget about the missing Start Menu even after watching the Welcome Intro...

Exactly, most users being the key point. You need to target all this stuff for the lowest key denominator and unfortunately for those of us on HN... but at least we have the knowledge that this exists. I think krautsourced point stands.

Damn if you do, damned if you don't!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com