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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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The User Account Control in Windows Vista improves security by reducing application privileges from administrative to standard levels, but UAC has been widely criticized for the nagging alerts it generates. According to one Microsoft executive, the annoyance factor was actually part of the plan.
In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft's strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.
"The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.
Microsoft not only wanted to get users to stop running as administrators, which exacerbates the effects of attacks, but also wanted to convince ISVs to stop building applications that require administrative privileges to install and run, Cross explained.
"We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it," Cross said.
Keith Meisner, senior systems engineer at AppTech, a Tacoma, Wash.-based solution provider, says UAC has helped Microsoft improve end users' overall security posture.
"Many of the situations we deal with have to do with users being uninformed about threats on the Internet," said Meisner. "Are there some annoyances with UAC? Yes, but advanced users know how to get around them."
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the annoyance was paid back, the first time someone clicked cancel to a frigging annoying poplaiden adware being installed... hell that one person saved from the infection saved probably a thousand annoyed users... mass spreading of malware is alot worse then a bit of annoyance from a protection mechanism.