Microsoft Exec: [Vista] UAC Designed To 'Annoy Users'

CRN Channel Web ^ | Apr 10, 2008 | Kevin McLaughlin

[dayglored]

The User Account Control in Windows Vista improves security by reducing application privileges from administrative to standard levels, but UAC has been widely criticized for the nagging alerts it generates. According to oneMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) executive, the annoyance factor was actually part of the plan.

In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft's strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.

"The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.

Microsoft not only wanted to get users to stop running as administrators, which exacerbates the effects of attacks, but also wanted to convince ISVs to stop building applications that require administrative privileges to install and run, Cross explained.

"We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it," Cross said.

[dayglored]

Confirmed by Microsoft: Vista was designed intentionally to piss you off.

Who'd-a thunk it???

[dayglored]

* PINGS PLEASE *

[ken21]

my copy of pissta, ooops i mean vista, won’t shut down.

so, i run my security software and tell it to turn bill gates off, and it does.

[dayglored]

> my copy of pissta, ooops i mean vista, won’t shut down. so, i run my security software and tell it to turn bill gates off, and it does.

So far I've only had to run it on my compatibility-test systems -- it's not my main working/development OS and never will be. I enjoy Mac OSX a lot, I work happily with Linux, and I even find XP pleasantly productive much of the time.

The times I've had to work on Vista, I feel like I'm in one of those bad dreams where you're running through thick mud and can't make any headway, and there is evil all around.

[utherdoul]

hahhahah! Ah I love Microsoft they are the only company that can pull this and still remain the top dogs.

[Defiant]

I turned off UAC within a week. It is severely annoying.

[dayglored]

> I turned off UAC within a week. It is severely annoying.

I hear ya there.

At work, I've got a few users who have Vista. Company policy is that UAC must be turned on. So after a week of Vista, what are they doing? They've learned to "click-through" the UAC prompts so quickly that they don't even see what they say -- they just approve without thinking about it.

It's a perfectly natural reaction. But it's a disaster, security-wise.

[fishtank]

bflr

[ShadowAce]

[Yo-Yo]

"You're coming to the realization that our new Vista operating system sucks. Continue?"

[AFPhys]

I believe that my LARGE research institution will not adopt Vista at all, and we buy hundreds of computers a year... and I suspect I will NEVER have to use any form of vista at all!!!

Linux, OSX... all good! XP - OK, but time consuming to assure security.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Microsoft not only wanted to get users to stop running as administrators, which exacerbates the effects of attacks...

"Attack" can also be used to describe attempts by MS to gain access to your PC...which has been stated in the past as an eventual goal.

Microsoft should simply rename their company "Brawndo". Hey, it's got electrolytes.

[Varmint Al]

"The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.

They sure were successful in annoying users.
Talk about being annoyed. Check out my experience installing Windows Vista Home Basic.

My Vista weekend!

I installed Windows Vista Home (upgrade) on one of my spare computers with a Mach Speed MSM939 Mother Board and a 250 Gb hard drive and 256Mb ram just to see if it could be done and what kind of trouble it would be. Well, I finally got it going, but it wasn’t easy.

I first had trouble opening the Windows Vista box. It said to pull on the red tab. My room was a little dark and I didn’t see the info on lifting the plastic tape off the edge. Well, with the aid of a screwdriver for a pry-bar, I opened the damn plastic case and parts fell all over the room. I was able to paste together the Key Code sticker to read the Key Code.

It didn’t start off well for sure. I extracted the DVD from the mess and also found the skimpy manual with quick start platitudes. Practically no useable info.

Well, I had the hard drive on the sacrifice computer partitioned with a 40 Gb C: drive and partitions D:, E:, F:, and G:. I thought that I could boot from the Vista DVD and install it and install it on the C: drive. I wanted a clean install. So I formatted the C: drive to remove the Windows XP Pro operating system on it and proceeded to do the install.

The Vista DVD booted up fine and I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW

A screen came up and said that I had to have at least 512Mb ram. Turned off the computer and installed another DDR 256Mb of ram.

Booted up again with the Vista DVD. It now couldn’t see the hard drive. I booted with Windows 98 and used Norton’s GDISK to see the hard drive. It was gone. I had to turn off the computer completely. Power off for about 5 minutes. Booted again with Windows 98 and now I could see the hard drive with GDISK. All of the partitions were gone. So I did a WipeDisk from GDISK. I was then able to create a 40 Gb Primary partition and format it in Fat32.

Booted from the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!

The new screen said that I could only install Vista Home from within Windows.

OK. Back to the Ghost restore and I restored a Windows XP Pro operating system on the C: drive.

Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!

Another new screen said that I could only install Vista Home from within Windows XP Home and I needed Windows Vista Ultimate or something like that. I wasn’t seeing to clearly at the new screen.

OK. I installed Windows XP Home on the C: drive which took about an hour. Of course I got all the prompts to Authenticate it but I ignored them. Now I have Windows XP Home running and I think I am home free. No.

Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!

The new screen said that I could only install Vista Home with a partition that was formatted with NTFS. I am thinking that maybe they could have told me all of these restriction in the first place.

I reformatted the C: drive and again installed Windows XP Home but this time I opted to convert the C: drive to the NTFS format.

I booted up Windows XP Home and started the install from there:
Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!

It let me do a “Clean” install without any of the programs running on Windows XP Home. Finally I get the install to take. I now practically know the Key Code by heart.

This took 2 days. That was my weakend. Not weekend. Monday I wanted to try a connect to the Internet from my wireless system. I have the Airlink USB wireless adapter and installed the software from the CD that came with it. It looked OK, but it didn’t work. I finally went on the Internet with a GOOD computer and downloaded the Vista drivers for the USB adapter. Somewhere in here a screen came up and said the driver wouldn’t work until Service Pack 1 was installed. I already had SP1 and yes, it did take more than an hour to install and it did restart the computer numerous time. At least I got a successful installation of SP1.

Now the Airlink USB wireless adapter was installed and working. I got on the internet and was able to view my web page. There was quite a bit of activity on the flashing lights on the wireless adapter. Heaven only knows what kind of info was being transmitted to Microsoft while that was going on.

All this time there was an error message that there was “no sound device installed”. The sound hardware is on the motherboard so I thought I would install the motherboard drivers. Bad move. I put in the CD and did the install. Agreed to reboot after the installation and the computer hung. When Vista hangs – that’s it. Control-Alt-Delete does nothing. The only thing that works if the Reset button. It still wouldn’t boot up “normally” so I booted up in Safe Mode and uninstalled the motherboard drivers.

Now I could boot up again. So I went on the internet and looked for the Mach Speed Vista drivers for the motherboard. I attempted to download them. About half way through the 15Mb file, the computer hangs. Mouse arrow doesn’t move. No hard drive activity. The computer just sits there. I hit to power off switch.

Back to a GOOD computer and I downloaded the motherboard drivers and the audio drivers and put them on a Secure Digital card. I booted up the Vista computer is Save Mode and was able to copy the driver files over from the SD card. I did the install and finally I was able to boot “normally”. I had to reinstall the drivers from the “normal” mode and now the computer seems to work. It still tells me that my USB port could be faster if I install 2.0 but it doesn’t tell me where I can get it. Later.

Windows Vista Home (upgrade) is pretty but if you don’t have a few days to spend trying to do the install, I would suggest if you want Vista, just buying a computer with it already installed.

Hunting coyotes or grounds quirrels would have been a lot more fun.

I still have Vista running on the test computer and I am learning the new frustrations one by one.

As long as I have a couple of GOOD computers running I was able to get the drivers for the motherboard, the USB Wireless adapter, the 5 button IntellMouse, and audio system off the Internet. I have played around with it more and it is essentially Windows XP Pro with a face lift and a lot of pretty makeup. The sound from my speakers is very good. Setting up the Virtual memory location, Paths and how it displays a folder view is the same as XP put it takes a different path getting to where the settings can be made. It took quite a while to find out how to display the full path and the file name extensions when viewing a folder, but I finally found out how. I still haven't cracked how to display the status bar at the bottom. I was able to use Ghost 2003 to write the complete image of the C: drive off to the E: partition. My old Ghost 2002 would not find a NTFS partition. I might just like Vista yet.... Maybe.

Trying to implement the old "set" command is still possible but must be done quite differently.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

Here is my Computer Page: http://www.varmintal.com/acomp.htm

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Ugly!

[Defiant]

Company policy is that UAC must be turned on.

That's too bad. You'd think that with good enough firewall at the server and an antivirus that automatically checks downloads and emails, etc., you can get away from UAC. UAC is needed by people who do stupid things. Maybe in a big company you have to assume you have a few of those, but it sure penalizes those who know what they are doing, and, like you mention, doesn't help much anyway, as people get used to clicking no matter what.

[dayglored]

>> Company policy is that UAC must be turned on.

> That's too bad. You'd think that with good enough firewall at the server and an antivirus that automatically checks downloads and emails, etc., you can get away from UAC. UAC is needed by people who do stupid things. Maybe in a big company you have to assume you have a few of those, but it sure penalizes those who know what they are doing, and, like you mention, doesn't help much anyway, as people get used to clicking no matter what.

Oh, I've got great protection set up, at the home office LAN.

But the Vista machines travel with their users, and spend a lot of time on unsecured (unencrypted) connections at hotels and customers' installations in Asia and Europe. Naturally we've got AV and software firewalls active, but the "belt AND suspenders" approach is probably a little useful in the remote situations.

Users do stupid things? Wow, who knew?

[Defiant]

Your 512mb memory is seriously low for Vista. That was probably why you were getting all the hangs.

[savedbygrace]

UAC = Universally Annoying (our) Customers

[Still Thinking]

But if they’re trying to “teach us” something, isn’t it a bad strategery to have the annoyance be greater when the system is more secure? Turn off UAC and the system is supposedly less secure and less annoying at the same time. Sounds like they’re not teaching what they set out to.

[Varmint Al]

I finally put in 1Gb of ram. It is running better now. How do you turn off UAC? I will be the only one using the computer and am the administrator on it.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al