> Who is Microsoft to decide what others do on their machines?
That would be an amazing rant had it only ended with "Sent from my iPhone".
Since the Blaster worm incident two decades ago, we're in a new era where security at scale becomes the forefront responsibility of the companies developing the product. That includes writing more secure code, having more verifications in place, adopting more secure technologies, but also, limiting user capabilities in order to avoid at scale security incidents.
This isn't about Microsoft. Some of these "forced" limitations are: UAC (User Access Control)/SUDO, Bitlocker/Full disk encryption, App sandboxing/On-demand permissions, Signed firmware and boot mechanisms, signed release binaries, Jailbreak-protections, Limitations on raw packet operations, auto-installed updates, forced security updates, closed source code, built-in anti-malware.
When you have a billion devices running around the world, you can't say "hey we'll let this arbitrary group of billion people do what they think is best for them", because you then end up with Blaster worm, and the whole Earth falls apart.
Think about the more recent CrowdStrike incident. That kind of deployment has been performed by professionals, not even regular people, and yet, it's managed to bring down the entire world to its knees. People might have died because of CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike happened because one of the "user-empowering" features: ability to install kernel drivers on a machine. Now, people are begging Microsoft to adopt a more isolated, user-mode-only device driver system, so this kind of incident won't happen. Yes, some users who want to install their precious kernel driver could have problems, but at least the world would keep running.
Microsoft is nowhere to be blamed about this. Secure defaults is the responsibility of every product that intends to be used at scale.
If you'd like, you can disable Secure Boot, keep your data in plaintext on your hard drive, let all applications run as root, and you'd be the most powerful user in the universe. I'm all for personal freedom to disable the security features, but, at scale defaults must always prefer security over capability. That's not about Microsoft, or Google, or Apple. That's about at scale risk management.