Posted on 04/11/2008 9:56:44 PM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at crn.com ...
I know! I read that story too. It was by turns hilarious, pathetic, sad, and painful.
> They just left off the rest of the sentence, "...once everybody rewrites their apps to work with the new security model."
Yep. So many apps still have the old DOS "anything goes" model. Hell, our financial payroll application (PayChex) is one of those. It assumes the user is running with complete control of the computer. AARRGGGH!!
>> STUPID, STUPID, STUPID. And all at the feet of Microsoft, by design.
> I read an article way back about the group that designed the dumb sleep/shut down/hibernate/etc menu. It's apparent that Microsoft's mismanagement and ponderous corporate structure with strained and slow communications are also largely to blame, not necessarily the programmers, and not necessarily by intentional design.
[and Still Thinking said:]
> I know! I read that story too. It was by turns hilarious, pathetic, sad, and painful.
Precisely. I read it too.
The other "dot" to connect about Vista is to recall how many of the key technical and management people associated with the project, from Jim Allchin on down, QUIT Microsoft over Vista. They didn't want to be associated with it, wiped their hands, and walked away.
That's very telling. At Apple, the engineers want to sign the inside of the product with their names. At Microsoft, they want to back away and not get smeared too badly.
God, I hate that term.
I'm going to guess that this thread is full of Microsoft bashing, so I'll throw in my obligatory
I really like Vista.
All my various development tools work like a charm. I have no problem w/ UAC. The user interface is great. Every minor problem I've had (eg. connecting to Samba shares on Linux servers) was fairly easily remedied.
To top it all off, when I need to switch to the local adminstrator account, whatever is playing on the audio of my main user continues to play while logged in as the local admin. Brilliant!!!
I really like Vista.
Yep. More power to ya. I wouldn't presume to talk you out of it if it's working for you -- I have a few users who like it. You're not alone.
> All my various development tools work like a charm. I have no problem w/ UAC. The user interface is great. Every minor problem I've had (eg. connecting to Samba shares on Linux servers) was fairly easily remedied.
Just curious, since we use Linux-hosted Samba shares also -- what minor problems did you run into and solve?
> To top it all off, when I need to switch to the local adminstrator account, whatever is playing on the audio of my main user continues to play while logged in as the local admin. Brilliant!!!
I take it you don't log out the main user. Which mechanism do you use? Fast-switch or RunAs? or something else?
Ha, I'm not easily swayed. I have more or less intimate familiarity w/ all the popular modern OS's, short of the modern Mac (and even there I am a NeXT afficianado), and several esoteric ones.
Just curious, since we use Linux-hosted Samba shares also -- what minor problems did you run into and solve?
How To Enable Network Share Between Visat and Mac OS X or Linux
I take it you don't log out the main user. Which mechanism do you use? Fast-switch or RunAs? or something else?
Right. There's a "Switch User" on the start menu, hidden behing a little right-arrow on my desktop. I'm thinking hard here, and I don't know of any other OS that does this. Does OS X?
KDE does this on Linux.
I say “Let’s round them bastiges that thunk up this here ‘Vista’ and fark them up gud...jess a bunch of martha farkern bastiges if you ask me....”
KDE let’s you switch between concurrently running desktops? I run GNOME on my Redhat servers.
Right-click on the desktop and choose “Switch User”
I annoy liberals for the same reason....I want them to change their behavior.
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