Comments

Hurrah! Looks like Longhorn is going to protect Admin accounts anyway:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/leastprivlh.asp

It'd be nice if something like this could be done on XP in the meantime though.

WinFS is now officially the second most exciting thing about Longhorn.

yotaku wrote:

It really doesn't help the non-tech-savy users much.  Just like prompts asking if they want to install Gator or not have proved to not help enough.

Perhaps not, but if you make the prompts informative enough without filling it with too much text it might at least make a few people stop and think.

Having to type a password tends to cause the average user to stop and think at least a little bit. The gator type prompts don't because users are too used to just hitting OK to anything that looks like it might be a EULA prompt that they can't be bothered to read.

Have to say I agree with amg in a lot of ways. SP2 is definately a big step in the right direction but Microsoft need to be even more proactive.

One of the things that really impressed me about Mac OS X was not the pretty visuals but the fact that it prompts you to re-authenticate when you're about to do something potentially unwanted.

If Windows could adopt a similar strategy, so that programs couldn't, for example, configure themselves to launch at start up without Windows requesting the users permission then a lot of silly little vunerabilities could be fixed in one go. Admittedly the current architecture doesn't help much but it'd be good to see more of this in Longhorn at least.

Interesting stuff. And possibly the coolest job title in history.