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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)."
Could they possibly make that "article" any more annoying? They'd have been better-served to turn it into a flash-animated slide show. I'm not going to click all the way through that thing.
Either put it all on one or two pages (interspersed with ads if you must), or put it into a slide show if the article is written as a slide show.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The whole point of Administrator is that you know what you do and you can Admin a machine securely. I know Joe Sixpack doesn't know how to, but doing this will put Admins all over the world in the place of "Limited User". In the end our Dear Joe Sixpack will just click and click until the task is done anyway. He will be frustrated and will get spyware anyway.
What we need is the equivalent of a Car Mechanic for administration. You call your mechanic and he'll do the maintenance for a fee. Frankly, it's the only way for home users.
Oh, and those that say that you can't run in Limited User on XP (as in the fine article is stated) are completely ignorant. I'm running Limited right now, and I have no problem. Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it's never been very hard. The only program I've never been able to run as non-admin is a game called "Children Of The Nile", and I still don't know how to run it as a Limited User. The user that needed it got the "Run As" option checked in the shortcut. Sure she has Admin access that way, but she's my sister and knows that she shouldn't run Admin.
No, all problems are just the cause of the legacy of poor security in the past. Nagging dialogboxes won't help.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
(more)
blarg.
With more and more people using Firefox, all those popups had to go somewhere...
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
I wish they would work a bit on account control on WinXP, it is a total disaster. I WANT to use my computer as a limited user, but when I need to do something in Administrator, I shouldn't be bothered to switch users. Why oh why can't they just make it so that is asks for the admin password like with every other goddamned OS!?!
Vista is nice and all that, but how about fixing XP first!!!!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I didnt quiet like the dialoge boxes because all of those are jarred on the right and bottom borders, as if someone has tore them off..... oh! wait...
fuvoo: watch something
"I explain why these prompts appear and why some so-called Windows experts miss the obvious reason (and the obvious fix)."
Well, good thing MS targets this OS exclusively to Windows experts. What utter fools we've all been for assuming this would effect our non-expert friends and families!
anyone else see the irony in an article talking about annoying click-throughs needing so many bloodly clicks to read?
This is the crux from the end of the article;
"How do you work around this annoyance? You have three choices:
* You can take ownership of the files on the external drive. That gives your account Full Control permissions at all times and prevents other users on the same computer from changing the files unless they do so as an administrator.
* Or you can change the permissions assigned to the Users group so that members of that group have Write or Full Control permissions. That solution allows everyone with a user account on the computer to manage files without having to OK a consent dialog box."
* Or you can play a Sony music CD with a rootkit."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
If you made your user "superuser" on a Linux box, the did a kernel upgrade and decided this was stupid so just allowed you to sudo certain commands then you'd have a devil of a time accessing all those files that you created while you were the super user.
Or put more simply
XP didn't have sudo so you were always admin, Vista has sudo, enabled via annoying popups rather than a config file.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The new Windows 'protection' scheme will browbeat the user until they disable the security system (in some way or another).
That way, when the inevitable virus and spyware hits the system, Microsoft can wash their hands and say that it's all the user's fault for making use of their computer bearable.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Microsoft is trying to make users have good hygiene -- that is, don't run as a super-user unless you need to. Well-meaning and well intended -- and a good idea. Ultimately, however, Aunt Sally is not going to deal with it for long, and you, the unofficial family Helpdesk tech, are not going to like all of the calls you get from apoplectic relatives dismayed that they suddenly can't open this that or the other because they do not understand the paradigm.
What will happen is what always happens: when there is a "problem" someone "fixes" it. In this case, the "problem" is the security model. I suspect that there will be a 3rd party "fix" that blasts through all the well-meaning security and basically restores the user-as-root scenario that Windows has operated in since forever.
Running as a Limited User is not impossible.
It just requires spending a LOT of time and effort to LEARN how to do so
and that pre-supposes that the person understands the risk of running as Administrator.
So, someone has to already be aware of the threat
Then that person has to choose to try to avoid that threat
Then, then that person has to spend time becoming further educated
Then, then, then that person has to spend time fixing the ACL's and such.
Or just choose to run as Administrator and all those problems go away (and you get new problems, but all your apps run).
So, in the end he recomends giving Users full control or write access as means to get around the annoyance. Hell, why dont we just chmod -R 777 /* and end all the "annoyances" of my Linux box too while we're at it?
Can't he just suggest that application designers get a clue and write apps that don't write uneccesarily to sensitive areas of the system? Hopefully annoyed end users will "motivate" lax companies when this happens instead of working around the issue.
--
Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it's never been very hard.
Your Momma.
As in, ask Your Momma to do that.
You see, my mother uses a Mac and is able to install updates herself and keep things running just fine, all without knowing what an ACL is much less how to set it.
Saying the average user needs the equivilent of a car mechanic to deal with computers is just sweeeping the issue under the rug and letting Microsoft off the hook for a half-assed solution to the problem. And also ignoring there are a hell of a lot more people that can fix thier own car problems than computer issues.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not saying UNIX is "better," since the primary issue here is social, not technical. If UNIX were in Windows' shoes, then third-party applications and slickly packaged malware would be popping up dialogs reading, "This application requires root priviliges to install. Please enter the root password: _____" So UNIX's user model doesn't really solve the base problem. However, I've been using Windows (mostly for gaming) for a while now, and I run with administrative privs all the time, because running as a limited user (in the UNIX sense) just doesn't work. Or, perhaps more precisely, it doesn't Just Work.
So what's the deal?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
As I understand the article, EVERYONE in Vista is a normal user. Administrators have the ability though to take administrator actions on a case by case basis after supplying credentials.
To me, this sounds exactly like "sudo" under unix/linux or the "Authenticate: blahblah requires that you type your password" under Mac OS X. This model is more secure and works great, but there are some legacy transition issues.
For you unix people, the problem the article describes is, "what if you mount an old drive, the drive has restrictive permissions, and the file owner UIDs don't match the new system?" (your user account doesn't have permission to do anything on the drive)
NTFS has file permissions, but they rarely came up in practice because everyone in Windows was doing everything as the Unix equivalent of root. In Unix, the obvious fix is to do a sudo chown -R newuser /mnt/olddrive (or an ultraghetto sudo chmod -R o+rwx /mnt/olddrive) . The user/permission concept is totally foreign to your average windows user though, and hence the problem.
Anybody who needs instructions on how to disable something using gpedit has no business running a beta operating system that was intended for a serious testing audience.
Come to think of it, having a meaningful conversation about an un-finished product is also quite silly. Ok, so in the light of this, I offer this comparison / excersize.
Test 1.) In Windows Vista, make a shortcut to a program you know needs admin to run. Time this part Click the icon, then click the resulting dialog as quickly as you normally would to grant it permission.
Test 2.) In Linux (for argument, lets say Ubuntu) pop open a term. Think in your head the name of an app or process / shell script that needs root or super user to run. Time this part type sudo then the name of the program or command.
Did clicking the box take longer than typing SUDO? meh. what a shame were wasting so much of slashdot's disk space on a coversation over a few milliseconds.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
I like the options "Continue" / "Skip" / "Cancel". Very obvious for a normal user what the difference between Skip & Cancel is ;-)