UAC BS

Howdy once again from RSA. It's raining. So much for sunny California!

Jeff and I just gave our talk about Windows Vista Security Engineering. It was a packed room. In fact, when we got to the room we saw a bunch of people milling around outside. We went to the door to enter and we were told we could not enter because the room was full. We thought the previous talk had yet to finish, but we were wrong, it was filled with people attending our talk. We asked if we could enter because we were the speakers, and again we were told, "NO" Then Jeff said, "seriously, we're the speakers." So they let us in. So much for security!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

There is a great deal of FUD about UAC. Yeah, it was very chatty in beta 2, but we really made a great deal of progress for the final release of Windows Vista. In general, it's a little chatty at the start, but once you settle in, install the apps you need, and the printer drivers and so on, it's pretty quiet.

But there is a perception that it's still very chatty. Here's a case in point. I bumped into a guy I haven't seen in a couple of years (let’s call him Xx) , here’s how the conversation went.

Me: How’s things?
Xx: Good, you?
Me: Kids doing well?
Xx: Growing up! How are Blake & Paige?
Me: Getting into my computers, read my blog.
Xx: What's new? Things going well with you?
Me: Excellent, we shipped Vista. Yay!
Xx: It’s ok.
Me: Waddya mean?
Xx: Too ‘noisy’?
Me: Waddya mean?
Xx: too many pop-ups.
Me: Like what?
Xx: UAC stuff
Me: When do you see the pop-ups?
Xx: all the time
Me: When?
Xx: When I do stuff
Me: Like what?
Xx: everything!
Me: like when? I probably get two prompts a day – and that’s only ‘coz I do geeky stuff. Gimme specifics
Xx: like right when I logon
Me: we suppress prompting on logon/startup, and fail the app load, you will see no prompts as you logon.
Xx: oh.

At this point Xx had a sheepish look...

Perception != Reality.