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Vista Security — Too Little Too Late
Thomas Greene of The Register has a fairly comprehensive review of Vista and IE7 user security measures. The verdict is: better but not adequate, and mostly an attempt to shift blame onto the user when things go wrong. From the review: "[Vista is] a slightly more secure version than XP SP2. There are good features, and there are good ideas, but they've been implemented badly. The old problems never go away: too many networking services enabled by default; too many owners running their boxes as admins and downloading every bit of malware they can get their hands on."
They don't do it because typing a password is too damn annoying.
UAC is still useful as an Administrator. Until you elevate your privileges, a UAC user *is* a regular user (essentially they have two possible tokens, a regular user token and an Administrator token, and unless you elevate, they're using on the regular user token). This means that the "protection" that it offers is the same; what differs is the ease with which you can switch between the two kinds of user (click a button vs. enter a password). So I don't think that's actually a huge problem.
Whenever something is done for which the regular user token isn't good enough, you can elevate to an Administrator token. That brings up the UAC prompt; it does it for broadly the same category of operations that MacOS X or Linux will demand root access for.
The thing is, the prompt is quite annoying. It's not any more annoying than it is on other OSes; they're annoying too. But a password is even more annoying than clicking the box. And if something is annoying, well, people are going to try to avoid it.
That's the dilemma faced by MS. If they make the thing too annoying, everyone will one way or another disable it. Originally UAC not only required a password, but also a ctrl-alt-del (so that the password couldn't be intercepted or anything). ctrl-alt-del to enter the password was too annoying; it was too intrusive. So they disabled that by default (though you can reinstate it if you want, through a GPO). Entering a password by default was also too intrusive, so again, they disabled it by default (and again, you can reinstate it across the board, even for Administrators, if you want). The reason they did this is because they want the level of annoyance to be livable. If UAC is so annoying that people outright disable it, it's useless. If it's a minor annoyance, they probably won't turn it off.
I've been using Vista since it went RTM, and I have to say, I don't see many UAC prompts any more. I did at first, when I was installing all my software, but now, it's pretty infrequent. It's certainly something I can live with. I did try cranking it right up--passwords for all users, with ctrl-alt-del to enter them--but it's far too annoying to put up with. I can't really fault MS for making the trade-off the way they made it. Hopefully, as applications improve, elevation prompts will become more infrequent (for example, I have to elevate to play Battlefield 2, because Punkbuster "needs" admin rights... this is something that they really need to fix), and when this happens, demanding a password to elevate won't be so onerous. But as things stand right now, there are just too many problematic applications. This isn't really MS's fault (it's not like NT's DAC is new...), but it is something that they've got to live with, and provide a solution for.
There's an "I'm a Mac" ad which covers this: http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/ap ple-getamac-security_480x376.mov