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Vista's care in the community

Posted on 24 Apr 2006 at 10:51

Jon Honeyball kicks off his look at Microsoft's next operating system with a renamed beta

No, no and thrice no. This is insanity all over again. This is exactly why you got into the god-awful mess that XP is in today in the first place, with viruses, worms and spyware running amok. And it gets worse because, by default, a Standard user account doesn't require a password to be entered to log in.

What's so galling about all this is that there's a perfectly good function in Vista that allows you to run an application as Administrator. You can right-click on any application and choose 'Run as administrator'. Whenever you do this, a dialog pops up asking for your permission. The contents of the dialog will depend on whether you're an Administrator or Standard user account. If you're Administrator, it doesn't need your password for confirmation; you just get Allow and Cancel buttons. Cancel is the default, but this really isn't much in the way of protection, is it? If you're a Standard user, the dialog asks for the name and password of an Administrative account. Quite frankly, such a request for username and password of an Administrative account ought to be the default, even for an Administrator, to drive home to them what they're about to permit to happen.

There should be a default Administrator account in the OS when it installs. Let's call this 'root' and let's disable it by default. The first account that's created when the user logs in should be a plain user, not an Administrator, but supplying this first account's password into a dialog should allow the 'Run as Administrator' trick to work. This enables the first user of the machine to perform administrative tasks on the machine, but to do so from the position of a contained, walled garden. Doing it this way would mean that the first user isn't running as Administrator, except for those specific occasions when it's necessary for setting up the machine. The default for any second or third users on the machine should be the same as for the first - a plain user who's granted admin privileges when necessary. And also make it very easy to lock down those accounts so that they can be used as restricted-use accounts for children.

None of this is hard - this is exactly how things work in Apple OS X. If the current Vista Home Premium settings carry through to the shipping product, Microsoft will have shot itself in the foot again before it starts. There's one light at the end of the tunnel, however. Some months ago, I detailed the utter nonsense that software vendors such as Electronic Arts recommend on their technical support websites for running their games, including, incredibly enough, recommending that you delete all other accounts on the machine, make yourself Administrator and so forth. All this to install a game.

Well, I tried to install EA's Need for Speed: Most Wanted as a Standard user and it threw up a dialog box telling me that it needed Administrator privileges. No problem; I logged in as an Administrator account and tried again. And I got the same dialog box. So that's just fine by me - EA's game won't install at all under Vista, giving you some idea of what unrestricted access it wants to your OS and hardware. I did manage to get round this by opening up the DVD browser, finding the AutoRun application and choosing 'Run as Administrator' for that. This then worked, indicating that being Administrator might mean different things depending on where you're looking. Having completed the install, it attempted to run under my 'Jon' Administrator account, but then crashed claiming it had a problem that prevented it from continuing. One can only hope that Microsoft doesn't build in a whole heap of bodging patch files to allow this sort of mess to run unabated, and that instead it forces lazy vendors such as EA to create properly working applications.