Alright man. Can you tell me which consumer-facing OS doesn't do those that you mentioned by default? Apple downloads setup files for major OS upgrades as well as system updates automatically without my consent too. I don't want Siri on my Mac too. How can I get back the enlarge window button without holding down alt on the Mac? Google Chrome is the software that pioneered the whole silent update thing. If you want to call out any company at least try to be equal.
With that qualifier I am willing to bet you aren't considering GNU+linux a "consumer facing os"?
I also far too often see this logicaL fallacy being used. I was recently railing against MS and someone said, "well I'm more worried about facebook, what about them?" Your comments about OSX and Chrome have almost nothing to do with the the current discussion topic which is MS updates systems. I wish people would stop doing this equivicating, it's tiring and logically fallacious.
A person can call out any company they want for anything they want on the merits of their argument without it having to turn into a major company comparison.
All that said... gnu+linux actually allows the user control, and things like this can be stopped.
Bottom line is this, either the user controls the program, or the program controls the user. Google, Apple, and MS have all shown they are more concerned with controlling the user than giving them freedom. GNU+linux or really just GNU, is the future of freedom, and until people start understanding how inherently political software is, and stop basing their software choices purely on pragmatics (but mah lozedoze gaming!), these types of problems will continue to happen and have things written about them, but the solution is already here.
It's amazing how many people defend Apple while attacking Microsoft here. It's almost as if Apple pays people to do this.
We run Windows 10 and the lastest Windows server on all our machines and don't have problems because we have good, in-house, local IT people and also good security on the edge routers.
The comment you're replying to points out a lot of obnoxious "We know better than you" flaws in Mac OS X that the user has no power to override. I don't see how that's a defense of Apple.
I can uncheck the box that says "Automatically check for updates". It's trivial to override these perceived "flaws" in OS X.
Try doing that with Windows. The best you can do is peruse some lists that people maintain in places like Github. Maybe those work, maybe they don't. Consequently I've avoided Windows for well over 10 years now (except for XP in a VM, which I use for playing Freecell).
> Microsoft abused the update system to download an entire, multi-GB OS (Windows 10) on systems running on Windows 8, "just in case they will want to upgrade".
Just pointing out that Microsoft is not alone with the above practices? It's not a question of whether you can disable it or not, it's that ALL companies do this. I don't necessarily like this but I empathize, general consumers don't know what's good for them, and Microsoft's reputation for security is on the line here.
