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Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Users
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."
If they'd done this from the start, no one would be complaining. In Linux or UNIX, if a program wants elevated privileges, it requires user intervention. The result is that programs don't expect to have superuser privileges if they don't actually need them, and everyone is happy because the only things that have to be done as root are things you'd expect to require root access.
It Worked!
You cannot force someone else to follow a particular coding practice when your coders do not do so themselves.
I don't think that is what he really meant. What MS is trying to do is actually the right thing. MS wants to make it access privileges more like Linux. It wants to make it so that random programs can't run a muck with admin privileges. This is MS's attempt to get application makers to stop requesting privileges that they don't need because they are too lazy to program it the right way.
Look, I'll be the first to decry Vista as a piece of shit, but despite all of Vista's flaws, trying to restrict access of programs is a good thing.
Personally, I think that MS is slowly learning. MS is in no danger of losing its business division so long as companies demand backwards compatibility, but in personal computing it is getting kicked around. MS looks old and faded while Apple has a solid product combined with a marketing machine of d00m (Microsoft always sucked at marketing). MS needs to make changes or else it is going to get run over by Apple. Lock in isn't going to last forever in the face of a comparable, if not outright better, product and vastly superior branding and marketing.
I mean hell, what do you think of when you think of Apple? Shinny plastic with a hipster in a coffee shop. What do you think of when you think of MS? A moldy office.
No they didn't design UAC to annoy users. This was a crass statement made by a Microsoft employee. No company would design something to annoy users. This was a poor use of self-deprecating rhetoric that will be exploited to the extreme. It's a dumb statement for a Microsoftie to make, and really dumb for the media to exploit.
"Stupid is as stupid does", somebody once said.
This approach could have worked. But if they really meant for it to work, then developers would have been required to embed usable contact information in the application. When the UAC prompt came up it would explain that this was a result of an action taken by the application, and that if it seemed unnecessary to you, you should click a button and send feedback to the developer.
It would also identify and tag the particular circumstances so that there could be a option, "don't warn me about this again."
This latter option would have been particularly useful during the beta phase.
After a couple of years, Microsoft might then assume that developers had been given adequate warning and adequate feedback, and the option to ignore warnings could have been retracted.
What Microsoft did doesn't sound as if they serously wanted the approach to work. They just wanted to be able to say that users "didn't want" security, just the way Detroit said for decades that car buyers "didn't want" safety.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Slashdot Users.
There. All better.
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John
I have been asked and wondering why Microsoft has such a bad track record in security and user access control especially since recent Windows have been built on NT which comes from OS/2 and VMX. According to me it's fairly simple: group permissions. Look at a default Linux/Unix-style installation, you have about 20 groups to start out with. If you're a desktop user, usually you're a member of audio, video, games, cdrom and user. On a Windows machine you're either a User or an Administrator. The way the Linux kernel and it's modules are built, if you need direct access to hardware, you can either be root (not good) or you can access it through it's /dev entry which has group permissions.
So if you want to play music, you can access the hardware (albeit through a kernel module) by making yourself member of the group audio. In Windows however, if you need direct access, you can either use DirectX or a process (daemon) or become an Administrator so you can get to the kernel. There is no group Audio that has only access to the Audio-part of the kernel. As soon as you need direct access for real-time anything, you can't really add yourself to any group to do so.
This of course goes way back before desktops were running NT versions (like 2000 or XP). Before, Windows was running on top of DOS, developers could just code directly into the hardware (just load dos4gw), there is no access control in DOS. DOS was also not meant to be running any services or be connected to a network that's where the whole thing with virusses got started, anything that was running could simply request a hook into the BIOS, under the hood, protected memory was regulated with emm386 while Windows 95-ME all used the faster, less secure himem.sys. Microsoft merged together the NT and DOS and made it into 2000 and XP. There were no extra permissions added for desktop users, the pure server model was coded around to allow for desktop speed and real-time access to hardware, never giving any thought that actually running all services that hook into hardware as Administrator would give problems.
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What they didn't anticipate though, is people screening out the warnings. Yes, it's important for you, the developer. No, it's not important for the user, who only wants to Get Stuff Done (tm).
If the same yes/no question pops up every 10 minutes, don't expect a different answer when it says "Do you want to install spyware, adware, a couple of trojans, and [whatever they actually wanted to install]?".
Remember, users don't read. Not because they're incapable, they have more important things to do.
HP driver annoyances (their shitty home(/SMB) devices are notorious for this and end up even in larger setups cause of ignorant buyers) can be usually quite easily fixed by searching the registry by device name or ID and giving users group more control over those subtrees. Be aware of security considerations and give only minimal level of extra rights that are neccessary.
Msconfig is your friend when disabling unneeded startup items. I especially loathe the auto-updaters that get installed by default if you don't know specific installer parameters. Sun java is class A example of that crap, it informs limited users about updates and recommends them to upgrade - only halfway through it throws error message.
But not with UAC. The normal integrity level application can't sniff anything about the UAC elevation. And the elevation password dialog runs on a separate secured desktop so the malware can't access it.
Windows is not *nix, the Windows developers learned from the mistakes of sudo.