The uac is just very bad concept. There is not a control panel app that gives quick control with help files. I bet if MS kept track of problems prevented by this in real world test cases, number of benefits = 0.

Modern virus, malware, and other junk will not be slowed down by this. All this will do is get in the way of what users want to do.

I agree with the author of this article, the Vista UAC is training us to automatically approve any thing it asks.

Dumb user interface.

And, yes, if my house alarm was going off all of the time, with false alarms, I’d turn it off, too.

Chris Shaker

The UAC “MAY” be usefull for my grandmother but 99% of the time, I know what I want to do an do not want to confirm. For the other 1%, hey I screwed up and will deal with the consequences.

Anyone at Microsoft ever heard of Pareto’s rule?

mark

Maybe the purpose of the prompts is that Microsoft will say ‘Hey, we warned you about the threat and you allowed it’ when something bad really happens.

And as far as calling wolf too many times… when was the last time you heard a car alarm going off in the middle of the night and did anything besides hope the owner would turn it off soon?

It looks like the only similarity between UAC for non-administrator users and sudo is getting a prompt. Other than that, UAC for non-administrator users seems like su or runas. There is no Linux equivalent to UAC for administrators, because well, as this article points out, such a feature is not really useful.

I am not sure if I get your argument. But your point seems to be that because similar features for Mac OS X and Linux improved security, it will do the same for Windows. I don’t know about Macs, but sudo in Linux works differently than UAC prompting. It is more comparable with the runas command which is available for older Windows versions. It is something very different from a psychological point of view if an admin tells the OS explicitly to run a command with root privileges, especially if he has to authenticate with a password. On a Linux box I also have the su command. So I can logon as admin without much hassle If I have to do several things which need root privileges.

My argument is that these UAC prompts will decrease security because sysops will just forget to think of them as warnings and become used to clicking on them. They will just see this prompt “Windows wants your permission to continue”. Of course, I always want to continue. Why not? So, I click on it. This is dangerous because there are security related prompts which make sense. But if you train admins like rats, clicking all day on security prompts, they will confirm them even in cases where it is not advisable do so. That’s why I say that security related prompts with such a high rate of false-positives don’t address this problem.

As to your argument about file deletion: You know what I like most about Linux? If I type “rm * -r” it will just do what I want without bugging me with “Linux wants your permission to continue”. That is what I call a low false positive rate.

Sudo is a useful tool. There is no doubt about it. Parts of UAC, too. But UAC prompts for admins are not. This is a psychological argument, not a technical one.

Would you call the confirmation on final file deletion useless as well, because the “false positive chance” is so high?

And obviously you don’t possess a house alarm, otherwise you would’ve know about pre-alarms that do actually sound each time you open the front door.

Most people seem to forget that the same technology exists in MacOSX and Linux (especially Ubuntu) for many years now, and has proven to be very fine there. Haven’t read a single word of bashing that in years. And now that it’s in Vista, it suddenly got bad?

Sure, MacOSX and Linux apps are often coded better (Apple started publishing books on software design for its OS right along with the OS, first MacInside volumes from 1987 or something, and Linux users are paranoid about security by default )… but this feature could at least force Windows developer a bit to become more careful. Telling people to disable this will in the end lead to still no one caring… yeah sure, gets you less clicks, but keeps the software bad.
Hell, did sudo “decrease” security on Linux machines ???

If we KEEP this warnings, maybe more developers will start to wonder if they actually need admin rights, and adjust their apps.