Brace Yourselves - I’m About to Agree with Microsoft
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No, I’m not kidding.
Hell hath frozen over, you say?
Nah, read on…..
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Anybody who has read even one post on this blog knows that I’m not the biggest Microsoft fan (there - that was polite, wasn’t it?). Ok, that was the understatement of the year.
I think Microsoft had the germ of a good idea with UAC.
Please stop throwing things at me long enough to listen to what I’m saying.
The UAC, as I understand it, is a real pain in the patootie. The constant asking if this is what you really want to do is enough to drive the pope to violence. But the idea in itself is pretty solid. Not the idea of annoying people, although Microsoft seems to do that regardless.
Let’s take away the annoying confirmation bit. We’ll assume for the time being that you do want to open that program or go to that site or copy that file. I’m more concerned about the computer asking if things that could actually be harmful were ok or not.
Here’s where we run into a brick wall (or a firewall if you’re keeping score at home). I recognize asking questions as a good thing. I’m pretty happy when my computer asks me if it’s ok for the program I’m installing to change important settings or go out to the internet or change my start page. These are things I need to know about (and usually stop) before they cause damage.
The thing is, I don’t use Vista. Or Windows 7. I use XP, when I have to use Windows at all. The thing that’s asking me the questions can be my firewall (Comodo - free) or Spybot Search&Destroy. Both are lovely chatty little pieces of software that let me know when other software is trying to do something naughty. For me this is a good thing. [I mainly use linux though.]
Unfortunately I am frequently told that I am one of the few who find this refreshing. Most people don’t want to be bothered, hence the UAC hatred.
So now I ask you, would you be willing to settle on a less chatty UAC or would you prefer it be removed entirely?
If you want it to go away, what do you propose in its place?
Let’s say you open your browser (I use Firefox and Opera, you probably use IE) and go to Google.com. This is a fairly obvious and (hopefully) harmless destination. On the other hand, what if you open a program and it wants to go to Google? Or somewhere else…. is that ok?
Your computer has no way of knowing whether this is good or bad, unless you told it previously and instructed it to remember your choice. If you don’t want your computer asking you, you’re going to wind up with viruses, trojans, and spam. You might become a spam-spewer for the Russian mafia.
So tell me, people…. if not the UAC, then what? If there’s a better way of going about this, I’d like to hear about it. More importantly, Microsoft would like to hear about it. And they’ll pay you handsomely for telling them.
Failing that, what are we to do?
Well, people aren’t going to like this but perhaps it’s time to stop being so ignorant, turn on your brain, and learn some decent computer hygiene. You don’t have to know how to program a computer, but it would be helpful to know good from bad and how to keep your computer free of junk. Which sites are good and which aren’t. To use an antivirus, keep it updated, patch your operating system, and use a decent firewall. It’s not rocket science, although you might think so. You just need to get your head around keeping your computer safe.
You probably can’t tune your car or spin balance it. You can, however, make sure you keep the fluids filled and gas in the tank. Air in the tires. Have the oil changed. It’s not rocket science, right?
5 Comments
Randall Lind
March 17th, 2009
at 9:42am
How can you say anything about UAC if you never used it? Windows XP unless added in SP 3 doesn’t have it.
We don’t need UAC! Let security software do it job! UAC is attempt to kill 3rd party vendors.
leftystrat
March 17th, 2009
at 10:36am
Randall: re-read please. I did not say I’m for UAC so much as the fact that *something* is needed.
Out of curiosity, how are you alerted if something wants your browser to go somewhere or a program wants to change the registry?
Thanks for the comment.
JP
March 17th, 2009
at 3:24pm
What were you smoking when you said “I think Microsoft had the germ of a good idea with UAC?” (And where can I get some?)
UAC is just the Windows (read, poorly implemented) copy of what sudo has done for many years, and gksudo and whatever the Mac calls it have done for years. Security 101 says to never run as a privileged user unless it’s absolutely required. Of all of OSs I’m familiar with, only Windows prior to Vista makes it virtually impossible to actually comply with that utterly basic security rule. Mind boggling.
I haven’t used Vista either, so I can’t really speak to UAC usability. But I’ll guess that how well or poorly it works is directly related to how well or poorly Windows is architected and implemented. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Sort-of in M$s defense, they can’t fix the totally broken architecture without breaking backwards compatibility, which isn’t acceptable. OTOH, they caused a lot of the problems by allowing incredibly insane and sloppy programming practices from day 1. (What sane OS allows any user to install any random app *and* allows that random app to overwrite critical system libraries?!? WTH?)
OK, Win 3.x/9.x aren’t really operating systems, they are just fancy GUIs on top of a single user OS. But NT was (supposedly) an “real” “multiuser” OS (with cooperative multitasking, yeah right, pull the other one…). If they’d enforced non-privileged users and protected system bits they’d be a hell of a lot better and more secure today. But of course at the time that would have been a big change and broken a lot of things. Hindsight…
Randall said “We don’t need UAC! Let security software do it job!”
Umm, yes we do need it. If you are going to follow the basic security rule of least privilege (like every other sane OS and system in the world), then you need a way to temporarily elevate privileges, for certain users, when administrative things need to be done. Call it UAC, sudo or whatever, you need some way to do it. That is certainly a security function, though I supposed it’s arguable if the code that performs the function is “security software” or just common sense.
“UAC is attempt to kill 3rd party vendors.”
I don’t understand that point, but I will argue that the amount of software that is absolutely *required* to protect Windows from itself is completely insane. You (arguably) can’t even operate Windows without anti-virus, a firewall, and probably anti-spyware and other anti-maleware crap. Aside from the system resources (CPU/disk) that consumes (say goodbye to Moore’s law, A/V and all this other crap ate it), there’s the time and money spent researching and buying, the time and effort installing (and praying nothing breaks), and the time/effort spent tracking licenses and upgrades (for things that should not even be necessary!!!). Do you understand how insane that is?
With Windows we keep asking the wrong question. We ask, “What do I need to protect my Windows machine from itself and others?” We should be asking, “WHY do I need to protect my Windows machine from itself or others?” The damn thing should work and be usable out of the box or the manufacturer should be sued for incompetence.
I encourage you to go read _Geekonomics_ which is more-or-less a book-length treatment of the above…
Michael Palecek
March 18th, 2009
at 3:06pm
I recently started using Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 and I have to say that it the UAC is absolutly terrible. Everything I could possibly want to do on a server is locked down. While I can understand locking things down on workstation, if I log on to a server as an administrator to administrate something, why would I want to have user permissions.
I cannot even open a blank MMC without it asking for permission to continue. And using an MMC without anything in there does not change anything in the system. The only time I ever log into the server directly is to make an administrative change, it is like the OS is asking me if I am sure I want to do something every time I do something.
I understand the reason for it and I really want to comply with the best practice of having UAC turned on, but I do not know how many more times I can type in a long command into the command prompt only to have it fail because cmd was not opened as an administrator, just as the normal (administrator) user. (And yes, this includes short commands such as flushing the DNS cache).
Buffalo
March 18th, 2009
at 4:44pm
The UAC is a royal pain in the anatomy. 50 times any hour almost. Kill it.
What would I want instead? How about an internet environment where browsers don’t allow silent background loading of code. No java script. No activeX.
If I need some kind of code so that I can interact with my Bank, then that should be a code module that I actually download from my bank and install on my system. …and that’s the only way it gets on my system. …and that code gets to do one thing and one thing only–interact with that one bank. …and the data stream better be encrypted 87 ways to hell and back.
How about a browser execution space that is sandboxed out of the shrinkwrap?
How about a mail client that works the same way?
If what interfaces with the internet will not execute code from the internet, where’s the threat?
Really, the solutions are simple–but business won’t have individuals operating in a safe environment–there’s no way they can exploit those people otherwise. What business can exploit, the criminals can exploit.