A Fresh Look at Vista's User Account Control

Art Grimm writes to mention a post at Ed Bott's Microsoft Report on ZDNet. There, he talks about Vista's User Account Control, and the issues he sees with the setup as it exists now. From the article: "The UAC prompts I depicted in the first post are those that appear when you install a program, when you run a program that requires access to sensitive locations, or when you configure a Windows setting that affects all users. But as many beta testers have discovered, UAC prompts can also show up when you perform seemingly innocent file operations on drives formatted using NTFS. In this post, I explain why these prompts appear and why some so-called Windows experts miss the obvious reason (and the obvious fix)."

Comments

Re:oh, those are the simple solutions

[joelleo]

Well, a couple of things:

1. Some directories have permission inheritance turned off. Doing what you suggest wouldn't work without additional ACEs set for %systemdrive%\documents and settings, %systemdrive%\program files & %systemdrive%\windows among numerous others.
2. Some directories and files SHOULDN'T allow users to read, write, modify etc - %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts & lmhosts, %systemdrive%\system32\config & more
3. Many applications and capabilities require access to the registry for configuration info, real time data etc. Setting fs perms don't address this aspect. Even if you did something similar for the registry, you'd break far, far more than you'd "fix", as well as open up (more) drastic security holes

its not as simple a solution as you apparently think. I understand, obviously coming from the limited world of Owner, Group and Other, that you probably don't have a very firm grasp on the concepts, but ignorance doesn't grant you right to slag on folks that aren't as ignorant.