Comment by cesarb

> Also, Windows had the ridiculous default of immediately running things when a user put in a CD or USB stick - that behaviour led to many infections and is obviously a stupid default option.

Playing devil's advocate: absent the obvious security issues, it's a brilliant default option from an user experience point of view, especially if the user is not well-versed in the subtleties of filesystem management. Put the CD into the tray, close the tray, and the software magically starts, no need to go through the file manager and double-click on an obscurely named file.

It made more sense back when most software was distributed as pressed CD-ROMs, and the publisher of the software (which you bought shrink-wrapped at a physical store) could be assumed to be trusted. Once CD-R writers became popular, and anyone could and did write their own data CDs, these assumptions no longer held.

> I'm not even going to mention the old Windows design of everyone running with admin privileges on their desktop.

That design makes sense for a single-user computer where the user is the owner of the computer, and all software on it is assumed to be trusted. Even today, many Linux distributions add the first (and often only) user to a sudoers group by default.