Poor old Microsoft. When User Account Control was introduced in Windows Vista the crowd said it was too intrusive, broke applications, and not really more secure – partly because of the “OK” twitch reflex users may suffer from. In Windows 7 UAC is toned-down by default, and easy to control via an easy-to-find slider. Now … Continue reading Windows security and the UAC debate: Microsoft misses the point
I’ve been looking at music servers and music ripping software, and came across Ripfactory Micro, a fast and easy to use solution. Unfortunately when I ran it on Vista it came up with this message: Then it exits. I looked at the support pages and found that this is a documented problem: If you are … Continue reading Don’t tell me to turn off Vista’s UAC
Good article by Crispin Cowan, a security expert at Microsoft: Making it possible for everyone to run as Standard User is the real long term security value. It is unfortunate that Microsoft has done a poor job of articulating the purpose of UAC (User Account Control) in Vista, but good that folk like Cowan are … Continue reading Why UAC is (mostly) not a security boundary
Ian Griffiths has a nice post on why you should not disable UAC, even if you are are a developer. I’ve followed that advice and it works for me, though there are still one or two apps where I have to Run As Administrator. That does not include Visual Studio 2005. Despite the warning which … Continue reading Why you should keep UAC enabled on Vista
A couple of days ago I posted about programmatically detecting whether UAC is enabled. I was proposing to read a registry entry. Thanks to the power of blogs, my post drew a comment from Andrei Belogortseff, who has posted C++ code that does this properly. His library has functions for detecting whether the current process … Continue reading C# code to detect UAC elevation on Vista
An application may sometimes need to know whether or not the current user has administrative rights. This is complicated in Windows Vista by User Account Control (UAC) – the user may be in the Adminstrators group on the local machine, but nevertheless running with limited rights. When I came across this blog entry on COM elevation by … Continue reading Programmatically detecting whether UAC is enabled
Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) elevation prompt sometimes appears when it shouldn’t. Here is an example which works every time for me. I have a folder in Documents (within my home directory) called recordings, containing MP3 files. I double-click one of these files and it opens in Windows Media Player. Now let’s say I try … Continue reading A bug in Vista’s UAC
Hey Doug, I don’t want to pick on you but this… There are a few things about Vista that most “power user” types change, and so have I. I have the UAC stuff disabled, since I’m installing and configuring so much software right now that it just feels in the way. Doug Mahugh is a … Continue reading If Microsoft doesn’t use UAC, why should anyone else?
I have been surprised by how much of the Windows 8 desktop is present in Windows RT. I had been expecting something more cut-down, to support Office, Explorer, Control Panel and a few other utilities. In fact, it seems to me pretty much the desktop we are used to, though there are differences such as … Continue reading The Surface RT desktop: more here than I had expected
X-mini makes a popular range of what it calls Capsule Speakers, the latest of which doubles as a wireless speakerphone for your mobile, thanks to Bluetooth connectivity. Essentially, your smartphone sees it as a Bluetooth headset. First though, a word or two about the distinctive design. In the box you get the X-mini KAI, a … Continue reading Review: X-mini KAI, a Bluetooth audio dock you can put in your pocket