Microsoft caves in, will change Windows 7 UAC
Reacting to intense criticism of an important security feature in Windows 7, Microsoft Corp. Thursday said it will change the behavior of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7's release candidate.
"We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that well all see," said John DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two Microsoft executives responsible for Windows' development, in the second of two posts to the Engineering Windows 7 blog today .
"First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation," said DeVaan and Sinofsky. "Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation."
The changes, they said, were prompted by feedback from users, including comments appended to an earlier post Thursday by DeVaan in which he defended the modifications Microsoft made to UAC in Windows 7.
"Our dialog is at that point where many do not feel listened to and also many feel various viewpoints are not well-informed," DeVaan and Sinofsky said in the later blog post. "That's not the dialog we set out to have and we're going to do our best to improve."
The UAC feature, which debuted in 2007 as part of Windows Vista, but was altered to reduce the number of prompts in Windows 7, has been under fire since last week, when two Windows bloggers, Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng, first reported that it could easily be disabled by attackers.
Wednesday, they followed up with more information about how hackers could piggyback on UAC-approved applications to fool Windows 7 into giving a malicious payload full administrative rights.
Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world
On Twitter now
windows 7
Powered by Twitter
Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly
claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century
pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin
Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?
jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith
mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive
Where Google Chrome security fails: the password
I heard mention that the Chrome OS will have some sort of encryption available a la bitlocker. If it's possible to encrypt personal data using another password or key, then it may have potential for very secure data.... And Ubuntu has an 'encrypt home directory' option, perhaps google should follow suit.
- Dann
Join the conversation here
Quick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.
Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.
A small crack in Microsoft's "You gotta do it our way" attitude
Hooray, it's good to see Microsoft giving in even if only slightly to "public opinion" in this case. I would like them to go further with UAC, by having the option of opening up the UAC whitelist so that as a user you can add your own items to it. This is what lots of other security tools do (various firewalls, Spybot Search & Destroy to mention a few) and it works well.They also need to open up with Internet Explorer. Starting with IE7 it has become impossible to rearrange browser tool bars and buttons (for example, to position the address bar on its own line so that you can view very long URLs in their entirety, which developers often want to do).
While adding some nice features, they don't go far enough and unfortunately they've been quite intransigent as to giving us other features we crave -- in IE7 and IE8, not just with Vista and Windows 7.
While they certainly develop some very nice "cool" browser features, they fail to deliver quite a range of other desirable things that other browsers offer, such as multi-row tabs, option to have the tabs on the bottom of the page, option to select a URL entered in the address bar to open in a new tab so that you can do other things in another tab while the new tab's content is downloading).
There are all sorts of advanced options that the other browsers now offer, so IE8 is falling behind even before it has been officially released.
The same sort of thing can be said on the OS side. In Windows 7, for example, new task bar behavior is nice but nothing radical. (Thus, a free little utility called Taskbar Shuffle 2.5 enables yo to move taskbar icons around to your heart's content under Windows XP, so it's nothing to trumpet about in Windows 7.)
Why don't we have some of those major OS enhancements, as Microsoft was talking about in the early 2000s but since have cast aside?
Windows 7 really is just Windows 6.1 (as it is indeed labeled under the hood), not the "wow" OS that Microsoft needs to come out with.
I could come up with quite a long list of desirable OS and browser features that would really make us pay attention and queue up to but, but won't bore you with them here.
Once Microsoft softens their "You've gotta do it our way" stance they'll stop losing hard-gained hearts and minds.
婚活
今話題のお見合いで結婚http://www.bbsroom.com/cgi-local/diary/diary.cgi?room=sasaruo
http://free2.nazca.co.jp/mk26/sasaruo/
http://www.21styles.com/mybbs/sasaruo/index.html
http://asp.atomicweb.co.jp/id/sasaruo/bbs/
http://sasaruo.bbspace.jp
http://sasaruo.bbspace.jp/Bo-Top?start=1&b=141742&sessionid=ABj2xGB
http://www.chibiao.com/type_nka/nka2/sasaruo98/kauth.cgi
http://u-bbs.com/m/sasaruo/
http://bbs.jp-net.ne.jp/01/01/sasaruo.html
http://ppp.atbbs.jp/sasaruo/
http://pv-board.com/s1/sasaruo98/index.html
http://pokebi.jp/bbs.php?id=sasaruo
http://123bbs.jp/sasaruo/
http://bbs1.xiz.cx/?i=sasaruo
http://bbs.kodama.com/bbs/sasaruo
http://iricon.net/bbs_a/sr3_bbss.cgi?cat=33sasaruo
http://bbsss.net/sasaruo/
http://a1.wtakumi.com/bbs.cgi?id=sasaruo
http://bbsee.info/sasaruo
http://myboard.jp/list.php?id=sasaruo
http://a.viewst.jp/sasaruo/
http://bbs.j-banana.net/free_bbs/bbs.cgi?room=sasaruo
http://star.gakupani.net/usr/sasaruo/bbs.cgi
http://yy2.ziyu.net/yy/sasaruo.html
婚活
アラサーやアラフォーからでも間に合う婚活を結婚相談所やお見合いで婚カツをして結婚をするのが今大注目http://iricon.net/bbs_a/sr3_bbss.cgi?cat=33sasaruo
http://11766.myday.fm/
http://123bbs.jp/sasaruo/
http://14528739.at.webry.info/
http://a.viewst.jp/sasaruo/
http://a1.wtakumi.com/bbs.cgi?id=sasaruo
http://advenbbs.net/index.html
http://ameblo.jp/sasaruo
http://asp.atomicweb.co.jp/id/sasaruo/bbs/
http://b.cgiboy.com/Res/BBS/sasaruo/
http://b.koroweb.com/sa/user/sasaruo/
http://b43.chip.jp/sasaruo/
http://b5.spline.tv/sasaruo/
http://bbs.avi.jp/457420/
http://bbs.j-banana.net/free_bbs/bbs.cgi?room=sasaruo
http://bbs.jp-net.ne.jp/01/01/sasaruo.html
http://bbs.kodama.com/bbs/sasaruo
http://bbs1.xiz.cx/?i=sasaruo
http://bbs4.aimix-z.com/topic.cgi?room=sasaruo