Mar 4, 2006
Vista’s Security Downfall: User Tunnel Vision
Gadgetophile (great blog, by the way) has mentioned something today that really seems to hit the nail on the head to me.
Microsoft has upped security so that when a program that could be potentially harmful is run, either by the user or by some other means, Windows will ask permission before actually running it. The dialogue contains two buttons - Allow and Cancel - but Microsoft have totally missed a principal design idea with this: user tunnel vision.
These boxes will very quickly become an automatic thing for less tech-savvy users; automatically clicking Allow, that is. Gadgetophile uses the example that the box will soon look like it only has one button to the user - the ‘Make it Work’ button, and I completely agree with this.
Click below to see the pictures. I’ll take sudo any day.
Read - [via Gadgetophile]
Yeah it’s a very difficult issue isn’t it? If Microsoft hadn’t created this entire culture of ‘users can install or change anything’, then I don’t think there would be an issue.
But now when they upgrade an OS to be more secure, the have to provide an ‘out’ lest they get millions of complaints about users unable to do things they could do before. I seriously think they should have bitten the bullet and forced users to manually elevate to Administrator, or force them to log off and on again as admin.
I completely agree - maybe not have to log out and back in again, but certainly some kind of manual escalation. I don’t think this method is going to cut it.