You can change the password for any user on a Windows box without ANY credentials, provided you have physical access.
Seems we have forgotten this while everyone is fear-mongering about what someone can do over the 'net.
Actually that's only true if there is enough error in your measurements to cause a statistical distribution rather than simply the wrong answer every time.
I'd just like to sum up all the other comments I've made in this thread with one more - remember System Restore?
It was going to keep all of our system files safe by providing a place where all important files could be backed up for later. While I'll admit this has saved me some time on occasion since XP came out, it also has another use now which is much more important. System Restore is where viruses go to live in order to be faithfully restored to operation by the system every time it boots.
Carton of beer to the first successful misuse of the UAC sandbox to reinstate malware.
and yet when they do make an effort the first thing they do is bitch that "waah, i have to click something". ffs....
So you see nothing flawed about a system which asks you to click one button to confirm that you clicked another?:-D See we asked them to *do something* about security. So when we saw UAC, I for one did start crying.
I have clients who by their own admission will click "yes" to every damn dialog just to get them out of the way and get back to work. One of them said they'll keep having us come back to clean up their computers rather than change their behavior.
I agree, but be careful which issue you're clouding;-p... The fact that Windows has no concept that you might be doing stuff OTHER than the modal dialog that came up last is a separate issue.
And so now the chickens are home to roost, with literally hundreds of thousands of apps written to kindergarten competence levels. And Microsoft is in a bind: secure the OS and either break these stupidly written apps altogether, inundate the user with prompts every time one of them tries something stupid, or give up.
I think you can make too much of this. So what if I've got an old app that keeps its database in its own application directory? The problem (supposedly) is malicious code that is creating program file directories in which it can hide. Attempting to shoot any decent modern virus in the foot in this way will not only be futile, its also only stopping persistence of the virus, not the fact that malicious code is ALREADY running on your machine.
Remember that in 99% of cases this won't matter because the stupid user will go back to MySpace the next day and get the virus started manually.;-)
As a developer I disagree. Call me old fashioned but I should be able to grab everything under C:\Program Files\My App and move that to another machine and run it, finding all my data and settings still intact.
Take all your registries, home directories (which are for per-user settings files if absolutely required), etcs, vars and bins and shove 'em.:-p
Honestly though, those are best used to provide frameworks like.NET where all the crap that points my app to the right assemblies needs to be kept separate from my app itself - which in 99.9% of cases is simply going to consist of an executable, a settings and/or data file, and one or more libraries.
whereas Linux is prompting for a privilege escalation which then applies to that process.
Exactly right. However, that requires an underlying OS that has well thought out privelege levels and security features.
So Microsoft had to do UAC instead.:-)
P.S. Think I'm bitching a lot in this thread? Never EVER let them forget that they sold this to people for actual money. Where are the fixes and/or refunds? If you bought a car with a major flaw you'd have some recourse at this point, but with software you simply have to wait to give them MORE money for a new one, and THAT'S not guaranteed to work either. Never EVER let them live down that they charged actual money for this and had to be TOLD that it sucked.
Explaining their shocking implementation of differentiating local physicaly interaction from other input sources in tiny words does not make it suck any less.
What was so stupid about it is that you have to click one button to confirm another. What they needed was secure buttons that only a local user can interact with - kind of like what they have only without the prompt that interrupts you... that is if it can gain focus, otherwise it just locks the rig until you realise what is going on... but yeah other than that it's a great system.:-p
ARGH!
Don't encourage them. The options are:
Allow Always, Allow Now, Deny Now, ***Deny Always***.
There is nothing worse than seeing THREE buttons on such a requester. Do you people know what binary is about or what?:-p
They needed to hear that AFTER releasing to realise the reaction? They didn't realise that clicking a button to indicate that you really did click on the last button was not only illogical but incredibly, incredibly frustrating? They hadn't realised that one of the worst features Windows has is its insistence on asking you the same questions without ever offering you the option to 'always or never'?
ROTFF, LMFAO. If these people sat down to use their own products for five minutes before shipping they'd be dangerous.
Modded insightful!?!? Just proves this place is mainly yanks. Calling use of SI units confusing as opposed to realising that the vernier calipers or screw-gauge you are using have a proper name is possibly the worst violation of everything nerdy I've ever seen on slashdot.
Stick to 'monkey wrenches' they are much more your style.
I might have bought Crysis if I hadn't pirated it on Friday afternoon and finished it by Sunday morning. It's amazing how a game can have so much content and so little content at the same time. That's the main reason I won't buy most games even after checking them out. By the time I've driven down the street to get it I could have used up half of the supposed $80 worth of content playing the cracked version I already have.
the reason humans will never reach the stars is because of our shit software. we'll fall some number of man hours short somehow, and it will be equal to the number of hours someone spent clicking a dialog asking if you really clicked the last dialog or the software did. meanwhile all the guys writing the good software (which could have saved us all) will fail after spending hours making it so that their apps can update itself online just like 90% of all software does these days, missing some other breakthrough. the guy creating the standard to make it so programmers and users alike can get more done (which could have saved all of us) will lose his work when MS word does one of its formatting tricks. his manager will miss the meeting about it (which was our very last chance) because Outlook's version of getting attention is to leave a dialog that won't f*ck off on your desktop all day. the aliens (who can see our possible future vs the one we have) must be laughing their arses off.
there are no standards for commercial software, and its pretty unfair to insinuate that OSS is uniquely unusable when the world's most widely used spreadsheet package still asks you to save changes to documents it has opened in read only mode. oh yeah and if you cancel closing one document (because you aren't sure what it thinks you've changed, if anything), all the documents you HAD successfully f*cked off will reappear. one can only wonder what sort of development and quality feedback process (if any) contributed to such a situation being unfixed in a piece of software that is what, 20 years old?
so in the face of that why is OSS in particular suffering from usability issues? too many people implementing different ways of storing user preferences, different ways of opening and closing a program, different ways of giving software the ability to update itself - it leads to mass confusion for users and programmers and slows development. as a windows developer i can't imagine the confusion deciding to put my preferences in/etc,/usr/etc,/var. not that we don't have a similar situation on windows but we have IDEs and languages so closely coupled to the one OS that you will get exceptions from putting things in the 'wrong' place, if you somehow missed the fact the API will do it all for you in the first place. i hate to say it but this is where we need to go. in this way the Java VM was still one of the best things we ever got going. if dotnet was cross-platform, we'd be *much* more sorted, but still a long way off.
we have some great languages now, but we need to go beyond visual studio's ability to create a hello world app vs a hello world webpage, and turn it into something that really allows programmers to start writing their app, rather than all the little things that make a program into an app (that then bind you to ways of having to do things that you hadn't thought of). and these ways of doing things need to be as standardised as their end appearance. gigabyte easytune anyone? want a 4x4 on your desktop in order to read a few system monitors? did you open the program to read the monitors or see the 4x4? oh yeah, have fun getting rid of the monstrosity, because who knows where they've hidden the close button.
there are fabulous libraries for doing some the things i mentioned, but even deciding on one to use and then making it work with your code is just too tedious. i hate to say it but sometimes having one way of doing things rammed down your throat is better in the long run. but we need to go further and have accepted ways of doing things, both as programmers and as users.
standards that govern the way software interacts with you would increase productivity on computers worldwide. that means absolutely everyone. it shouldn't be acceptable that happening to be hitting a key while typing in one program can lose you work in another program - why aren't popup dialogs banned? because noone is there to ban them. someone needs to kic
What amazes me is how many people here talk of buying new books from stores. They cost like $50 (in Australia) and besides, what is this, the stoneage?
Recycle people! There are heaps of second hand book shops out there, not to mention clubs and exchanges.
I've already done this myself several times. The end user can do it themselves. When was the last time you did anything other than *read* about computers?
I agree with you to a point here. The problem is we all know that all us old fogies are incapable of communicating with 'kids these days' in anything but a 'porn is bad, mkay?' tone. It's one of the laws of the universe.
Like drug education it is doomed to failure from the beginning, no matter how well conceived or motivated it is. Trying to block kids and wasting our money (yes, I'm an Aussie) like this would make me laugh if the people behind it didn't take themselves so seriously.
And to all the Christians pointing out how immoral sex is, please go away. I won't even bother attempting to point out how ridiculous your views are in the modern age. Just get off the page and let normal people discuss this please.
I'm not attacking the point you're making, but did you find out why this person assumed you weren't the tech guy, or did you simply assume it was because you were (are) a woman? I run my own small shop and not having uniforms or dress code as such, at times I've been in similar situations. Looking like the mofo I do, it's quite often people involved in e.g. commission housing, property rental etc. If I was a more vain person I'd be distressed how many people think I'm there to get help rather than give it.
Your final statement reveals a great deal of pent up hostility on your own part. I can understand how that might come about, but don't assume that all hostility (or mistaken identity) that you encounter is due to chauvanism.
It means that most spyware today will be covered by MS's patent. It may dissuade a few people from going down that very dodgy path towards making cash.
Disclaimer: I am a self-employed IT guy with no specific obligation to completely support one organisation's every problem. Not exactly the same situation everyone is in, but...
I do understand exactly where you are coming from; I support these people every day. However, it doesn't change my feelings about someone who claims they are 'computer illiterate' when really they mean 'I'm to lazy to look at what is in the Tools menu, just show me the keyboard shortcut' or 'I really am too stupid to understand that I can right click on things, can you please cut and paste this table for me *again*'.
Remember, these people who are claiming to be so dumb are quite often intelligent professionals who are making more money in a more secure job than you. They have no excuse to be *that* stupid - there are people working for minimum wage in factories that are more 'computer literate' than some of the highest paid executives I 'help'. Even the IT guy from your local telephone provider sometimes is that dumb, but why make life easy for these idiots? When you go in and out of different places of business all day, you get a very 'survival of the fittest' attitude towards computer use.
As a flipside though: remember just how stupid word processors are these days. In OO.o or MSO, try to place numbered bullet points on a number pages, breaking each section with page breaks. If they don't stuff up the numbering completely they'll give you hell with trying to lay things out so that each bullet starts at the same point at the top of the page. I could go on for *hours* about how ridiculous it is to try and type in a so called WYSIWYG editor these days. After using either one for about five minutes I will be able find you a fault that stops me doing what I want to do - the kind of thing that causes a chump to have bad presentation somewhere in the world every minute of every day.
These peices of software have been broken for about 10-15 years and NOBODY has fixed it. As much as I abhor stupidity I can't believe people are able to use Office every day without committing suicide. I refuse to use either tool unless I absolutely have to and agree with the person who suggested using wordpad (or notepad to write HTML <- works great) - at least it works properly. I completely disagree with the point about how amazing and complex office packages are these days - they can't get the basics right, so f*ck the bells and whistles!
In short, I have to agree with the GP: If you're really that stupid (or more likely lazy) then screw you. If these pieces of software are in your critical path of operations then IMO you're an idiot from the start - assessing the quality of available operational methods before relying on them is not just Business 101, it's Life 101.
So here I am explaining for the fifth time why you shouldn't install the Yahoo toolbar on your office computer, and you have a problem with a piece of software I *do not use* and *do not care for*. Quite frankly *I* am less reliant on Office than you to do my daily job, so either:
1) learn it by reading help or experimenting, afterall it is *your* job to use this software, not mine (lucky for me MS development tools are kickass beyond Office's wildest dreams)
2) complain to the people who claimed the software could do what it isn't doing (e.g. writing a report, entering data into a spreadsheet, *closing a goddam document* - no, they really can't do *anything* right so f*ck them too) - complaining to me doesn't solve shit, I only wish I could fix their million lines of code with 10 that actually work in a consistent and reliable way
3) (Highly recommended) F*ck off with your stupid problems so I can take care of your network bottlenecks or something else actually worthy of my expertise
Can anyone tell I had a bad day at the 'office' today?:-D
Slashdot Mirror
You can change the password for any user on a Windows box without ANY credentials, provided you have physical access. Seems we have forgotten this while everyone is fear-mongering about what someone can do over the 'net.
Yes, thank you. This is why it is funny and sad, but not riot-worthy.
Actually that's only true if there is enough error in your measurements to cause a statistical distribution rather than simply the wrong answer every time.
I'd just like to sum up all the other comments I've made in this thread with one more - remember System Restore?
It was going to keep all of our system files safe by providing a place where all important files could be backed up for later. While I'll admit this has saved me some time on occasion since XP came out, it also has another use now which is much more important. System Restore is where viruses go to live in order to be faithfully restored to operation by the system every time it boots.
Carton of beer to the first successful misuse of the UAC sandbox to reinstate malware.
and yet when they do make an effort the first thing they do is bitch that "waah, i have to click something". ffs....
:-D See we asked them to *do something* about security. So when we saw UAC, I for one did start crying.
So you see nothing flawed about a system which asks you to click one button to confirm that you clicked another?
I have clients who by their own admission will click "yes" to every damn dialog just to get them out of the way and get back to work. One of them said they'll keep having us come back to clean up their computers rather than change their behavior.
;-p ... The fact that Windows has no concept that you might be doing stuff OTHER than the modal dialog that came up last is a separate issue.
I agree, but be careful which issue you're clouding
And so now the chickens are home to roost, with literally hundreds of thousands of apps written to kindergarten competence levels. And Microsoft is in a bind: secure the OS and either break these stupidly written apps altogether, inundate the user with prompts every time one of them tries something stupid, or give up.
;-)
I think you can make too much of this. So what if I've got an old app that keeps its database in its own application directory? The problem (supposedly) is malicious code that is creating program file directories in which it can hide. Attempting to shoot any decent modern virus in the foot in this way will not only be futile, its also only stopping persistence of the virus, not the fact that malicious code is ALREADY running on your machine.
Remember that in 99% of cases this won't matter because the stupid user will go back to MySpace the next day and get the virus started manually.
As a developer I disagree. Call me old fashioned but I should be able to grab everything under C:\Program Files\My App and move that to another machine and run it, finding all my data and settings still intact. Take all your registries, home directories (which are for per-user settings files if absolutely required), etcs, vars and bins and shove 'em. :-p
Honestly though, those are best used to provide frameworks like .NET where all the crap that points my app to the right assemblies needs to be kept separate from my app itself - which in 99.9% of cases is simply going to consist of an executable, a settings and/or data file, and one or more libraries.
whereas Linux is prompting for a privilege escalation which then applies to that process.
:-)
Exactly right. However, that requires an underlying OS that has well thought out privelege levels and security features.
So Microsoft had to do UAC instead.
P.S. Think I'm bitching a lot in this thread? Never EVER let them forget that they sold this to people for actual money. Where are the fixes and/or refunds? If you bought a car with a major flaw you'd have some recourse at this point, but with software you simply have to wait to give them MORE money for a new one, and THAT'S not guaranteed to work either. Never EVER let them live down that they charged actual money for this and had to be TOLD that it sucked.
Explaining their shocking implementation of differentiating local physicaly interaction from other input sources in tiny words does not make it suck any less.
What was so stupid about it is that you have to click one button to confirm another. What they needed was secure buttons that only a local user can interact with - kind of like what they have only without the prompt that interrupts you... that is if it can gain focus, otherwise it just locks the rig until you realise what is going on... but yeah other than that it's a great system. :-p
ARGH! Don't encourage them. The options are: Allow Always, Allow Now, Deny Now, ***Deny Always***. There is nothing worse than seeing THREE buttons on such a requester. Do you people know what binary is about or what? :-p
They needed to hear that AFTER releasing to realise the reaction? They didn't realise that clicking a button to indicate that you really did click on the last button was not only illogical but incredibly, incredibly frustrating? They hadn't realised that one of the worst features Windows has is its insistence on asking you the same questions without ever offering you the option to 'always or never'?
ROTFF, LMFAO. If these people sat down to use their own products for five minutes before shipping they'd be dangerous.
Modded insightful!?!? Just proves this place is mainly yanks. Calling use of SI units confusing as opposed to realising that the vernier calipers or screw-gauge you are using have a proper name is possibly the worst violation of everything nerdy I've ever seen on slashdot.
Stick to 'monkey wrenches' they are much more your style.
I might have bought Crysis if I hadn't pirated it on Friday afternoon and finished it by Sunday morning. It's amazing how a game can have so much content and so little content at the same time. That's the main reason I won't buy most games even after checking them out. By the time I've driven down the street to get it I could have used up half of the supposed $80 worth of content playing the cracked version I already have.
usability standards
the reason humans will never reach the stars is because of our shit software. we'll fall some number of man hours short somehow, and it will be equal to the number of hours someone spent clicking a dialog asking if you really clicked the last dialog or the software did. meanwhile all the guys writing the good software (which could have saved us all) will fail after spending hours making it so that their apps can update itself online just like 90% of all software does these days, missing some other breakthrough. the guy creating the standard to make it so programmers and users alike can get more done (which could have saved all of us) will lose his work when MS word does one of its formatting tricks. his manager will miss the meeting about it (which was our very last chance) because Outlook's version of getting attention is to leave a dialog that won't f*ck off on your desktop all day. the aliens (who can see our possible future vs the one we have) must be laughing their arses off.
there are no standards for commercial software, and its pretty unfair to insinuate that OSS is uniquely unusable when the world's most widely used spreadsheet package still asks you to save changes to documents it has opened in read only mode. oh yeah and if you cancel closing one document (because you aren't sure what it thinks you've changed, if anything), all the documents you HAD successfully f*cked off will reappear. one can only wonder what sort of development and quality feedback process (if any) contributed to such a situation being unfixed in a piece of software that is what, 20 years old?
so in the face of that why is OSS in particular suffering from usability issues? too many people implementing different ways of storing user preferences, different ways of opening and closing a program, different ways of giving software the ability to update itself - it leads to mass confusion for users and programmers and slows development. as a windows developer i can't imagine the confusion deciding to put my preferences in /etc, /usr/etc, /var. not that we don't have a similar situation on windows but we have IDEs and languages so closely coupled to the one OS that you will get exceptions from putting things in the 'wrong' place, if you somehow missed the fact the API will do it all for you in the first place. i hate to say it but this is where we need to go. in this way the Java VM was still one of the best things we ever got going. if dotnet was cross-platform, we'd be *much* more sorted, but still a long way off.
we have some great languages now, but we need to go beyond visual studio's ability to create a hello world app vs a hello world webpage, and turn it into something that really allows programmers to start writing their app, rather than all the little things that make a program into an app (that then bind you to ways of having to do things that you hadn't thought of). and these ways of doing things need to be as standardised as their end appearance. gigabyte easytune anyone? want a 4x4 on your desktop in order to read a few system monitors? did you open the program to read the monitors or see the 4x4? oh yeah, have fun getting rid of the monstrosity, because who knows where they've hidden the close button.
there are fabulous libraries for doing some the things i mentioned, but even deciding on one to use and then making it work with your code is just too tedious. i hate to say it but sometimes having one way of doing things rammed down your throat is better in the long run. but we need to go further and have accepted ways of doing things, both as programmers and as users.
standards that govern the way software interacts with you would increase productivity on computers worldwide. that means absolutely everyone. it shouldn't be acceptable that happening to be hitting a key while typing in one program can lose you work in another program - why aren't popup dialogs banned? because noone is there to ban them. someone needs to kic
No, and thanks for reaffirming my faith that at least some of us are here because we actually want to know this stuff.
Especially considering that when you go buy that Tyan mobo you're probably going to get 8MB onboard graphics and no AGP/PCIE slots. ;-)
What amazes me is how many people here talk of buying new books from stores. They cost like $50 (in Australia) and besides, what is this, the stoneage?
Recycle people! There are heaps of second hand book shops out there, not to mention clubs and exchanges.
Perhaps a good spinoff of this is that people will take a good hard look at just how crap XML is to start with?
I've already done this myself several times. The end user can do it themselves. When was the last time you did anything other than *read* about computers?
I agree with you to a point here. The problem is we all know that all us old fogies are incapable of communicating with 'kids these days' in anything but a 'porn is bad, mkay?' tone. It's one of the laws of the universe.
Like drug education it is doomed to failure from the beginning, no matter how well conceived or motivated it is. Trying to block kids and wasting our money (yes, I'm an Aussie) like this would make me laugh if the people behind it didn't take themselves so seriously.
And to all the Christians pointing out how immoral sex is, please go away. I won't even bother attempting to point out how ridiculous your views are in the modern age. Just get off the page and let normal people discuss this please.
I'm not attacking the point you're making, but did you find out why this person assumed you weren't the tech guy, or did you simply assume it was because you were (are) a woman? I run my own small shop and not having uniforms or dress code as such, at times I've been in similar situations. Looking like the mofo I do, it's quite often people involved in e.g. commission housing, property rental etc. If I was a more vain person I'd be distressed how many people think I'm there to get help rather than give it.
Your final statement reveals a great deal of pent up hostility on your own part. I can understand how that might come about, but don't assume that all hostility (or mistaken identity) that you encounter is due to chauvanism.
It means that most spyware today will be covered by MS's patent. It may dissuade a few people from going down that very dodgy path towards making cash.
Disclaimer: I am a self-employed IT guy with no specific obligation to completely support one organisation's every problem. Not exactly the same situation everyone is in, but...
:-D
I do understand exactly where you are coming from; I support these people every day. However, it doesn't change my feelings about someone who claims they are 'computer illiterate' when really they mean 'I'm to lazy to look at what is in the Tools menu, just show me the keyboard shortcut' or 'I really am too stupid to understand that I can right click on things, can you please cut and paste this table for me *again*'.
Remember, these people who are claiming to be so dumb are quite often intelligent professionals who are making more money in a more secure job than you. They have no excuse to be *that* stupid - there are people working for minimum wage in factories that are more 'computer literate' than some of the highest paid executives I 'help'. Even the IT guy from your local telephone provider sometimes is that dumb, but why make life easy for these idiots? When you go in and out of different places of business all day, you get a very 'survival of the fittest' attitude towards computer use.
As a flipside though: remember just how stupid word processors are these days. In OO.o or MSO, try to place numbered bullet points on a number pages, breaking each section with page breaks. If they don't stuff up the numbering completely they'll give you hell with trying to lay things out so that each bullet starts at the same point at the top of the page. I could go on for *hours* about how ridiculous it is to try and type in a so called WYSIWYG editor these days. After using either one for about five minutes I will be able find you a fault that stops me doing what I want to do - the kind of thing that causes a chump to have bad presentation somewhere in the world every minute of every day.
These peices of software have been broken for about 10-15 years and NOBODY has fixed it. As much as I abhor stupidity I can't believe people are able to use Office every day without committing suicide. I refuse to use either tool unless I absolutely have to and agree with the person who suggested using wordpad (or notepad to write HTML <- works great) - at least it works properly. I completely disagree with the point about how amazing and complex office packages are these days - they can't get the basics right, so f*ck the bells and whistles!
In short, I have to agree with the GP: If you're really that stupid (or more likely lazy) then screw you. If these pieces of software are in your critical path of operations then IMO you're an idiot from the start - assessing the quality of available operational methods before relying on them is not just Business 101, it's Life 101.
So here I am explaining for the fifth time why you shouldn't install the Yahoo toolbar on your office computer, and you have a problem with a piece of software I *do not use* and *do not care for*. Quite frankly *I* am less reliant on Office than you to do my daily job, so either:
1) learn it by reading help or experimenting, afterall it is *your* job to use this software, not mine (lucky for me MS development tools are kickass beyond Office's wildest dreams)
2) complain to the people who claimed the software could do what it isn't doing (e.g. writing a report, entering data into a spreadsheet, *closing a goddam document* - no, they really can't do *anything* right so f*ck them too) - complaining to me doesn't solve shit, I only wish I could fix their million lines of code with 10 that actually work in a consistent and reliable way
3) (Highly recommended) F*ck off with your stupid problems so I can take care of your network bottlenecks or something else actually worthy of my expertise
Can anyone tell I had a bad day at the 'office' today?