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The problem is that no security administrator will feel comfortable in allowing any outside party to have access through the firewall at their internal machines containing confidential information. In the case of healthcare providers and defense-related industry or governmental entities, allowing such access may well be illegal.
For tech writers outside of those two areas, whether to enable automatic update is a function of your company's security policies. My post was intended to illustrate that blindly enabling this "feature" may not be a "good thing"--especially in cases where a fine and/or jail term may ultimately result.
In any case, it is not necessarily (as one list member so eloquently put it) "anal" to refuse to do so.
While you may trust Microsoft and its "security" as well as its "good" intentions, they have a long history of being so insecure themselves that confidential information (such as their internal development networks and, I'm told, their Passport database containing individual identification information including credit card numbers) that I am not nearly so sanguine.
In addition, since the offending language appeared as of Service Pack 3 of the Windows 2000 product, I object to the nature of it--if you want Microsoft to attempt to patch programming errors they made originally, you must agree to their license terms. In the law, this is called a "lack of arms length bargaining" among other things. "Heavy-handed" might be a mild method of describing it.
May I also point out that you *make your living* at least in part by selling add-on products to try to make a fundamentally insecure product have reasonable success in attaining information security? This may make you *just a little* biased, right?
Nothing so complex as a computer operating system is perfect; however, modern users should be able to have the expectation that the architecture of the system they buy is reasonably able to be secured from well understood vulnerabilities when used for the purpose for which it was designed and for which the user bought it. The simple fact is that the various flavors of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems were designed from the beginning to operate in a networked environment. Each of them can be secured without adding additional products. In the case of the open source products, this securing is done through text files without requiring any particularly difficult skills to master.
You may make great money selling firewalls to try to make Windows secure. Just as good for any users would be to put a couple network cards in any computer they have lying around and install one of the many *BSD or Linux variants already configured to serve as router and firewall. Some, in fact, fit on a floppy drive and run from memory, further reducing the ability of intruders to hack the firewall.
Of course, that strategy, while incredibly effective, would reduce the income of folks in your business.
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