Die AutoRun Die

Another year has almost passed and I have not yet ranted about an awful, unnecessary and totally annoying feature of Microsoft Windows, so today I am going to tell you why AutoRun should die.

AutoRun is the "feature" where you plug something into your computer and then stuff happens completely out of your control. The thing you plug in might be key drive, camera, iPod or whatever. Last Christmas I won a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer USB key drive as a door prize. When I plugged this horrible little thing into my computer it installed the U3 driver with useless and dangerous functions that I DO NOT WANT! To make matters worse, there is no obvious way to remove the driver or its annoying functionality. To top off the bad behavior, even although I immediately erased the entire contents of the drive, when it was plugged into another computer, it infected that computer with its unwanted drivers as well. I have thrown the key drive away to prevent further damage.

The combination of USB key drives and AutoRun is a serious computer virus infection vector to the extent that key drives are being banned in critical places. However the problem is not just with key drives. I have not disabled AutoRun because I use it two to three times a week to sync my iPod with the latest podcasts. Recently my daughter plugged her iPod into my computer just to recharge the battery. First this caused iTunes to crash, then when I brought it back, it wanted to sync my stuff onto her iPod. My daughter does not want anything of mine on her iPod and I had to jump through hoops to prevent the sync.

The problem is that iTunes and everyone else has totally bought in to the automagic nonsense of AutoRun behavior. A much simpler, safer and easier to use behavior is to have the user plug in a device and then bring up a program to use the device. Unfortunately the designers(?) of Windows decided to emasculate their users and instead give the device the power to decide what it wants to do. The subliminal message from Microsoft is that you are too stupid to operate you own computer so we are going do it for you, or let anyone else who might have more of a clue do it for you. The consequence of this design is that our computers do not belong to us, but to hackers who exploit these "features" as attack vectors to take control of them.

If you sit back and think about it, Autorun is obviously ill conceived. The design center is that a single user is logged into their computer and actively using it. What does AutoRun do when nobody has logged into the computer, what does it do when two users are logged in? In the example that I gave above, my daughter plugged her iPod into my computer when two people were logged in and the screen saver had locked both accounts. Of course iTunes crashed, it did not know what to do.

The iPod and iTunes is particularly annoying because it is unusable without AutoRun. On the iTunes support web site, the top support issue is "iPod doesn't appear in iTunes" and the second issue is "iPhone does not appear in iTunes". However there is no button in iTunes to go and look for an iPod or iPhone, instead they rely on AutoRun with no easy fall back should that fail.