Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Users

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday April 11, 2008 @01:12PM from the at-least-they-are-being-honest dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."

1 of 571 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Of course... by mpe · 2008-04-11 21:24 · Score: 0, Redundant

The point I was making is that multi-user, remote-computing is experiencing a resurgence of popularity; and that UNIX has its roots in that way of doing things, whereas Windows does not. I never said Windows lacked the capability.

Windows has had the capability since NT 3. The problem appears to be that application developers often don't understand the basic concepts.