5 ms·

I have always wondered who could have possibly thought Autorun was a good idea. Let's give complete control of the system to anyone who gives you a CD! Your n

by amalcon 16y ago

I have always wondered who could have possibly thought Autorun was a good idea. Let's give complete control of the system to anyone who gives you a CD! Your neighbor's photo album can give you a virus now! Sony can install a ridiculous content protection system without your knowledge or consent!

jarek 16y ago
There's that saying about hindsight.
- nandemo 16y ago
  It's such a huge flaw that there's no need for hindsight, really. A good tester should be able to point out the problem with autorun with no prompt.
  - jarek 16y ago
    Autorun was introduced in Windows 95. The security world, especially on consumer OSes, and especially again on Windows 9x, was very, very different back then. CIH wouldn't come around for another three years. CD-R burners were pretty expensive and pretty rare, cheap USB drives were a twinkle in someone's eye that wouldn't materialize for another five years at least. We don't know that the problem wasn't noticed; maybe it just wasn't considered to be crucial. Consider the magic-like benefits it would have been weighed against: all you have to do is put the CD in! Edit: the USB specification and first USB consumer products weren't released until 1996. Further food for thought.
    - nandemo 16y ago
      Well, I don't really understand how that contradicts what I'm saying. I still think a decent tester should have been able to point out the problem back then and mark it as "critical". For me it's so uncontroversial it could even be an interview question. Viruses and trojans already existed back in 1995, and I don't think anyone would claim then that CD-R burners would remain expensive for long.
      - jarek 16y ago
        Said tester would have been overruled by a PM.
      - ghshephard 16y ago
        Security versus Flexibility - from 1995-1999 Microsoft, Flexibility frequently won out. It's better to have a monopoly on the world's operating systems, but be insecure, than to have the worlds most secure operating system, but have some other company be the market leader.
  - powertower 16y ago
    Assuming that the average computer user in those days (and even today) was capable of navigating to the cd drive letter, entering it, and double-clicking "setup.exe", "install.exe", or "app.exe" - via some type of an understanding of what to do after inserting a cd.. would be an even bigger flaw. Autorun did exactly what it was designed to do and solved the problem both for Microsoft and the software shops with users not being able to install products -- the worst of the worst of issues.
    - ericd 16y ago
      This. Lambasting autorun as an obvious design flaw is really betraying a lack of perspective on what's actually important in a computer's design. Yes, security is important, but making it easy for normal people to use the computer was much, much more important, and hiding people from the crap at the core of windows (like needing to hunt down blah.exe) was a very important part of that.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
You have to keep in mind the technology of the time. The only user modifiable media was a floppy disk (which didn't have autorun enabled, I believe). PCs were becoming "multimedia" computers and the CD-ROM was the center of that. CD-ROMs could then only be manufactured by rather large companies and typically cost a significant amount of money to acquire. The idea that people would acquire autorunnable media casually was foreign. The idea that the ability to create autorunnable media would be common as dirt was also foreign. Moreover, the internet was still new and not widely popular so the problem of malicious autorunnable media was thought to be fairly limited in scope. The modern era of dirt-cheap user modifiable CDs and USB drives along with ubiquitous internet connectivity opens up the seemingly small (though still serious) security problems of autorun into gaping holes. Moreover, at the time many developers didn't take security issues very seriously.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Eh? The CD-R spec was published in 1988. By 1995 the drives were still expensive but patently heading on the road to being cheap commodity parts, by 2000 they were clearly commodity parts fitted to many, many PCs. Microsoft had ample evidence of the possible when the feature was launched and plenty more time to correct the mistaken assumption within the next few versions. That they didn't see this coming is a terrible indictment.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    CD-R equipment was still hugely uncommon and expensive in 1994 (when many of the decisions for Windows 95 were being made). Most people didn't have the hard-drive capacity to store an entire CD-ROM, nor a computer fast enough to burn a disc without skipping. Early CD burners were SCSI equipment requiring an add-in adapter card to be used. Together this put the CD burner in the realm of the niche product used only by enthusiasts for a fairly long time (in computer years). The decision to use autorun may have been a bad decision but in historical context it was far from obvious that it was bad. The biggest failure in making the decision was in ignoring its likely longevity. By the time CD burners, usb flash drives, and always-on internet connections were ubiquitous it was fully 2 Windows releases later. It's a common failing of imagination to think that it will be easy to remedy design decision errors in later releases easily (see the Y2K bug, for example). Personally I loathe autoplay, even in its milder "prompt first" current incarnations. But the magnitude of the poorness of the decision to adopt autoplay pales in comparison to other poor decisions made at the time. The entire security model (or lack thereof) of Windows, which proved utterly unsuitable to the modern ultra-connected multi-user world. The common practice encouraged by computer manufacturers, OS manufacturers, and ISPs to put ordinary desktop computers directly on the internet rather than behind a NAT layer or proper hardware firewall. The use of null terminated strings in C/C++ along with unsafe standard libraries of string functions. And a myriad of design errors in HTTP and SMTP which have caused a mountain of security problems since. Against those autorun (which, unlike many of the above problems, can be turned off) hardly merits notice.
GavinB 16y ago
You just popped the CD in and the program on it came up. A few years before that, the average computer was still booting to a command prompt. For non-hackers, auto-run was amazing. And since then, it has worked as intended billions and billions of times. Some microscopic fraction of those have resulted in a virus, rootkit, or other issue. Just because something bad can happen in a small minority of case doesn't mean a feature is a stupid idea.

by amalcon 16y ago

jarek 16y ago

There's that saying about hindsight.

nandemo 16y ago
It's such a huge flaw that there's no need for hindsight, really. A good tester should be able to point out the problem with autorun with no prompt.
- jarek 16y ago
  Autorun was introduced in Windows 95. The security world, especially on consumer OSes, and especially again on Windows 9x, was very, very different back then. CIH wouldn't come around for another three years. CD-R burners were pretty expensive and pretty rare, cheap USB drives were a twinkle in someone's eye that wouldn't materialize for another five years at least. We don't know that the problem wasn't noticed; maybe it just wasn't considered to be crucial. Consider the magic-like benefits it would have been weighed against: all you have to do is put the CD in! Edit: the USB specification and first USB consumer products weren't released until 1996. Further food for thought.
  - nandemo 16y ago
    Well, I don't really understand how that contradicts what I'm saying. I still think a decent tester should have been able to point out the problem back then and mark it as "critical". For me it's so uncontroversial it could even be an interview question. Viruses and trojans already existed back in 1995, and I don't think anyone would claim then that CD-R burners would remain expensive for long.
    - jarek 16y ago
      Said tester would have been overruled by a PM.
    - ghshephard 16y ago
      Security versus Flexibility - from 1995-1999 Microsoft, Flexibility frequently won out. It's better to have a monopoly on the world's operating systems, but be insecure, than to have the worlds most secure operating system, but have some other company be the market leader.
- powertower 16y ago
  Assuming that the average computer user in those days (and even today) was capable of navigating to the cd drive letter, entering it, and double-clicking "setup.exe", "install.exe", or "app.exe" - via some type of an understanding of what to do after inserting a cd.. would be an even bigger flaw. Autorun did exactly what it was designed to do and solved the problem both for Microsoft and the software shops with users not being able to install products -- the worst of the worst of issues.
  - ericd 16y ago
    This. Lambasting autorun as an obvious design flaw is really betraying a lack of perspective on what's actually important in a computer's design. Yes, security is important, but making it easy for normal people to use the computer was much, much more important, and hiding people from the crap at the core of windows (like needing to hunt down blah.exe) was a very important part of that.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

You have to keep in mind the technology of the time. The only user modifiable media was a floppy disk (which didn't have autorun enabled, I believe). PCs were becoming "multimedia" computers and the CD-ROM was the center of that. CD-ROMs could then only be manufactured by rather large companies and typically cost a significant amount of money to acquire. The idea that people would acquire autorunnable media casually was foreign. The idea that the ability to create autorunnable media would be common as dirt was also foreign. Moreover, the internet was still new and not widely popular so the problem of malicious autorunnable media was thought to be fairly limited in scope. The modern era of dirt-cheap user modifiable CDs and USB drives along with ubiquitous internet connectivity opens up the seemingly small (though still serious) security problems of autorun into gaping holes. Moreover, at the time many developers didn't take security issues very seriously.

eftpotrm 16y ago
Eh? The CD-R spec was published in 1988. By 1995 the drives were still expensive but patently heading on the road to being cheap commodity parts, by 2000 they were clearly commodity parts fitted to many, many PCs. Microsoft had ample evidence of the possible when the feature was launched and plenty more time to correct the mistaken assumption within the next few versions. That they didn't see this coming is a terrible indictment.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  CD-R equipment was still hugely uncommon and expensive in 1994 (when many of the decisions for Windows 95 were being made). Most people didn't have the hard-drive capacity to store an entire CD-ROM, nor a computer fast enough to burn a disc without skipping. Early CD burners were SCSI equipment requiring an add-in adapter card to be used. Together this put the CD burner in the realm of the niche product used only by enthusiasts for a fairly long time (in computer years). The decision to use autorun may have been a bad decision but in historical context it was far from obvious that it was bad. The biggest failure in making the decision was in ignoring its likely longevity. By the time CD burners, usb flash drives, and always-on internet connections were ubiquitous it was fully 2 Windows releases later. It's a common failing of imagination to think that it will be easy to remedy design decision errors in later releases easily (see the Y2K bug, for example). Personally I loathe autoplay, even in its milder "prompt first" current incarnations. But the magnitude of the poorness of the decision to adopt autoplay pales in comparison to other poor decisions made at the time. The entire security model (or lack thereof) of Windows, which proved utterly unsuitable to the modern ultra-connected multi-user world. The common practice encouraged by computer manufacturers, OS manufacturers, and ISPs to put ordinary desktop computers directly on the internet rather than behind a NAT layer or proper hardware firewall. The use of null terminated strings in C/C++ along with unsafe standard libraries of string functions. And a myriad of design errors in HTTP and SMTP which have caused a mountain of security problems since. Against those autorun (which, unlike many of the above problems, can be turned off) hardly merits notice.

GavinB 16y ago

You just popped the CD in and the program on it came up. A few years before that, the average computer was still booting to a command prompt. For non-hackers, auto-run was amazing. And since then, it has worked as intended billions and billions of times. Some microscopic fraction of those have resulted in a virus, rootkit, or other issue. Just because something bad can happen in a small minority of case doesn't mean a feature is a stupid idea.