Microsoft Says Other OSes Should Imitate UAC

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 1, 2007 @05:28AM from the bring-'em-down-to-our-level dept.

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.'"

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Re:UAC == *TERRIBLE* Security Idea! by JWW · 2007-05-01 07:03 · Score: 0, Redundant

Exactly!!!! Moderators mod parent wayyy up.

The first thing I thought when I heard about how onerous UAC was was, "What a great way for Microsoft to blame any and all problems on the user!!!"