How many other ISPs intend to follow AOL's practice and use their connection support software to fix the defaults on their customer's Windows computers?
Sounds good to me. The potential for these users to be less-than-educated enough about the existance of this "feature" means that the potential for this to increase the overall network security is a good thing.
Hopefully they will enable automatic checking and downloading of critical software updates as well.
The "without notice" part is perhaps somewhat unsettling. I can appreciate that attempting to explain this type of change to the AOL user base would be challenging, but I'd submit that third-party software making OS changes like this without the user's knowledge could be "thin ice" territory. Where is the line drawn once this path is chosen? -Terry