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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.'"
I'm not sure about NTFS but I know a big issue with permission issues is within the FAT filesystem itself. Anyone who can read FAT can read any file by any user and execute any program. One thing nice about any SysV/BSD based OS is that the fs has builtin features that describe who and what can be done with each file. Though NTFS might have fixed this, not sure since I dont use it.
We should also probably stop selling guns with *just* a safety on them. After all, someone can still stick it in their mouth, click the safety, and pull the trigger. Why should the user hold any responsibility for their own well being? That's clearly someone else's problem...