Microsoft Says Other OSes Should Imitate UAC

COA writes "Many Vista adopters find User Account Control irritating, but Microsoft thinks it's an approach other OSes should emulate. Microsoft Australia's Chief Security Adviser Peter Watson calls UAC a great idea and 'strategically a direction that all operating systems and all technologies should be heading down.' He also believes Microsoft is charting new territory with UAC. 'The most controversial aspect of Watson's comments all center around the idea that Microsoft is a leader with UAC, and that other OSes should follow suit. UAC is a cousin of myriad "superuser" process elevation strategies, of which Mac OS X and all flavors of Linux already enjoy. The fact is that Microsoft is late to the party with their Microsoftized version of sudo. That's really what UAC is, after all: sudo with a fancy display mechanism (to make it hard to spoof) and extra monitoring to pick up on "suspicious" behavior.'"

Comments

Re:Obligatory

[truthsearch]

It's no joke. They really do believe they invented the idea:

Patent #6,775,781

Re:Hello Microsoft

[toadlife]

I manage several labs and have had to deal with this type of crap software for ages. There are better solutions than giving students admin rights and using expensive band-aides like deepfreeze.

Repackage those programs into msi installers using wininstall (or admin studio if your boss will spring for it). Set permissions on files/directories with a machine startup script using cacls and set registry permissions via group policy or the command line. You can find out where the programs are trying to write with process monitor by sysinternals.

Students in my labs log on as guests and all of the crap software they have to run works just fine. It takes a lot of work up front, but once you get a piece of software repackaged and proper permissions script worked out, you can deploy it using GPOs and never have to think about it again. Most of my labs, I have not visited in over a year.