Techtree News Staff, Apr 16, 2008 1240 hrs IST
A Product Unit Manager at Microsoft is reported to have said at last week's RSA Conference that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to "annoy users".
A Product Unit Manager at Microsoft, David Cross, is reported to have said at the RSA Conference held in San Francisco last week that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to "annoy users". Why? To put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure, as any insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing code.
Cross had been the Group Program Manager in charge of designing the supposedly annoying feature -- 'User Account Control' or UAC, which, when activated, requires users to run Vista in standard user mode rather than having administrator privileges, and offers a prompt in case they try to install a program.
At the RSA conference, Cross explained that most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems, and that most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run. Cross said their target was to change the ecosystem. He went on to explode the myth that users just turn off UAC; apparently 88 percent users are still running UAC as per Microsoft estimates. Cross further said it is a myth that users blindly say 'yes' to prompts without reading them.
Incidentally in March last year, security major Kaspersky had severely criticized UAC that it would make Vista less secure than Windows XP. However at this year's RSA conference, the company seemed to change tack. Jeff Aliber, US senior director (Product Marketing) of Kaspersky, said that with Windows, there is a large attack surface with a number of entry points. Anyone trying to shrink that attack surface and promote secure applications development has to be a good thing!
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Vista itself is designed to annoy users. And I'm sure many can relate to this. How many times have you felt like shooting the bahlls of the Microsoft programmer that designed the "are you sure you want to move the system file thumbs.db" when you're set a bunch of large files for copy across say two HDDs and returned later only to find that nothing has been copied.
marantz | Bangalore | 16/04/08 09:29 PM | Report abuse Reply
Hahaha...too good and soo true brother. I'd like to use a baseball bat and work on that Microsoft programmer though.
rocky | rockville | 16/04/08 10:24 PM | Report abuse
True. Like to work on his nuuts. My weapon of choice is a needle at the end of a stick.
siva | hyderabad | 17/04/08 10:50 AM | Report abuse
This strategy of annoying users to stop using software (and OS itself!) has not been new to Vista! Its Microsoft's legacy ;-)
Ashish | Noida | 17/04/08 09:45 AM | Report abuse Reply