Anyone that has used Windows Vista at all will be familiar with User Account Control (UAC) prompts. The bulk of these you will see during initial setup of your machine, typically during installation of new software but occasionally during management of your machine. If you see one of these that does not correlate to one of these actions then guess what you should cancel it.
Symantec seems to think that UAC prompts are a big enough problem that they are looking into designing software that could answer them for you. Now to me this seem to be really short sighted. Even if they can succeed in inserting into the UAC process, which I doubt they can, this would just serve to perpetuate a problem with security that has plagued Windows. Microsoft has taken a huge step in increasing Windows overall security and this technology can only undermine its effectiveness.
Steve Hiskey of the Windows Security team had this to say on it, "normal users only elevate to install... and install SHOULD have an elevation prompt. If it is "daily" application that needs elevation but should be running as Standard User, then Symantec is doing the industry a disservice by auto-elevating that application rather than pushing the vendor to fix the application to work correctly."
I agree completely with Steve's comment and in my opinion the fundamental answer to User Account Control prompt abundance is to correctly design software for Windows Vista. This and only this should be used to control the frequency of prompts. If a software vendor can't produce a design that works on Windows Vista then they won't be getting any of my money. I have run as a standard user since day one on Windows Vista and I can honestly say that I rarely have to interact with UAC prompts anymore.
Robert over at Windows-Now also has some valuable insight.
Posted
Jan 10 2007, 03:28 PM
by
Josh Phillips
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