Details on Refining Vista's User Control

borgboy writes "Windows Vista has gotten a lot of negative press recently following the release of the latest beta, especially regarding excessive prompting for privilege escalation for seemingly common activities. On his blog, Steve Hiskey, the Lead Program Manager for User Account Control in the Windows Security Core group, details what the issues with the excessive prompting are, what the design goals of the feature are, and how they plan to achieve them. Briefly - they know the excessive prompting is a royal pain, they know that have to reduce it to an absolute minimum to be both productive AND an effective security risk mitigation measure, and they want as much feedback as they can get on the beta."

Comments

SAme as in OSXs early days

[Henriok]

Mac uses have gotten used to the authorization of petty procedures by now but it was a real nuisance in the beginning, some five years ago. Software developers have gotten used to it also and have written better installers that don't require multiple instances of authorization, or any at all, installers that installs in non restricted areas and so forth. I think these issues will pass with time for Vista users too. In the mean time, they really shoud take joy in the fact that malware will be increasingly scarce on the platform.

Excessive security?

[w33t]

This "excessive prompting" is never complained about with OS X, or within Linux. What's the big deal about being asked for credentials when doing an installation or when performing privileged executions? Is not "excessive prompting" exactly what keeps malicious code from auto-executing and essentially is the primary reason there has been no self-replicating OS X worms to date?

I recall that recent "Mac Virus" which masqueraded as an image - however, if you clicked on it it would ask you for your password which set off alarms immediately. Had Apple decided that it was too much of a hassle for the user to enter their username everytime they needed to install a piece of software, this virus may very well have been successful.

I think the reason it's going to seem "excessive" is simply because of the lack of virtually ANY prompting in previous versions of Windows.

It's all relative, I would think.

Now, requiring Vista to play certain games however, that's excessively lame and nonsensical.
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[Anonymous Coward]

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