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Vista 2007 User Account Control Examined
Friday, September 1st, 2006
Only last January, before Beta 2 arrived and nearly a year before it’ll finally be released, I started
spending a serious amount of time with Microsoft’s upcoming desktop OS, Windows Vista 2007. I don’t usually make predictions about the final look of an OS so early in the beta process, as doing so is typically a fool’s errand, but back then I’d have said that I could state one thing for certain about the final version of Vista: "That irritating User Account Control [UAC] thing has got to go."
As I said, I’d have been a fool to write the UAC comment, because I now see it as a useful tool. But not everyone–ahem–sees my point of view. So this month, let me take up the cause of what may well be Vista’s most-hated feature. UAC, formerly called Limited User Access and then User Account Protection by Microsoft–and called a whole lot of things that we can’t print by others–is an intrinsic piece of Vista intended to, among other tasks, reduce users’ chances of inadvertently installing malware on their systems. I’m simplifying here, but basically UAC attacks malware by preventing malware’s most common means of installation: deceiving a user into approving the malware installation. As anyone who’s helped spyware victims knows, many users don’t realize that running seemingly innocuous programs or clicking on hyperlinks might do more than let them play some fun game or see pictures of naked people; instead, the program or hyperlink is probably trying to fool those folks into lending that program or hyperlink their administrative permissions and privileges so that the malware
But how does UAC prevent users from installing malware? Again I’m simplifying, but basically anytime you do something that would require administrative powers, from installing a piece of software to changing your system time, UAC opens a dialog box that essentially says, "Hey, you seem to want to do something that’s reserved for administrators; did you mean to do that?" That’s why many Vista beta testers hate UAC. It’s irritating. When I first saw the UAC prompts, I thought, "I’m sitting at MY computer, doing things that I want to do, and this blasted thing is raising my blood pressure by insulting me by questioning my intelligence. Off with its head!" So I shut it off, and told anyone who’d listen that they should do it, too. But then I had a revelation back in early June, when I was helping what seemed like the millionth person to remove 10 different pieces of spyware from her computer. Here’s an intelligent person. Someone who works in a technical field other than computers, and yet she’d not only opened Pandora’s box, she’d put an addition on the house to make the box’s former occupants feel right at home. Vista 2007’s User Account Control Examined
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