No, we're not talking about your traditional ethical questions of choice of life, rather, we're referring to your ability to run programs as a local administrator on your computer.
See, since the beginning of Windows 6 Shell, there were incrementing levels of User Account Control, termed UAC in Vista and now Windows 7. These tools made Vista annoying to everyone, but really prompted you to be sure of what you are doing before you break your system.
Windows 7 came out, and offers a more lax UAC policy, where Microsoft is claiming that "if a user runs malicious programs as an Administrator and those programs do malicious things, that's not a security flaw, because the user ran the programs as an Administrator, and an Administrator is allowed—by design—to do things that can break the system." This is the pro-choice argument.
The counter argument, ergo pro-life, revolves around the liabilities Microsoft holds in not preventing users from doing malicious things to their machines. Since the UAC isn't comprehensive, they argue that Microsoft isn't doing a good enough job at preventing malicious things from occurring in the first place, regardless of whether an administrator chose to run it or not.
So the choice stands; do you create computing systems that do exactly what they're told, or do you design them to have enough intelligence to sustain their own existence? And where is the line drawn on how much power is taken away from the computer owner? Some people would argue that you should be able to do anything you want with your computer, cause it's your property, others would argue that the computer should limit what you can do for self-preservation purposes?
What do you think? Should Microsoft be liable for not preventing malicious actions, or should all computers let you do what you want to do with them?
[via
ArsTechnica]
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