Dialogs that have more than 14 words

Yea, I made that thing as part of a bug report. Good to know that Microsoft are paying serious attention to it :)

UAP in Vista 5270 is seriously broken. I mean, it asks you before it does anything!! It's like, you can ask it to run "services.msc" from the start menu, and it asks you to permit it again. Would I have asked windows to run it (even giving the file name since there is no link), if I didn't want it run?!

Amazing...seriously amazing...

The trend seems to be to simply push the security burden onto the end user. The "solution" to every tricky situation seems to be to ask the user if it's OK to do something that may or may not be bad.

While of course non-interactive, automatic bad things are certainly not the answer, the reactionary "solution" to simply insert some canned interaction prior to the bad things happening isn't the answer either.

You don't need more than 14 words or 7 dialogs

A single dialog with a few words that simply pushes the security burden onto the end-user is all it takes -- heck, you could just push this into the EULA and be done with it ;-) Vendors could still claim "we warned you," which is really the only "benefit" of any security dialog for the average, non security-professional user, no matter how many with any count of words

Hehe, I've not gotten *quite* that cynical :) For example, in Firefox, I've not turned off the feature that warns me when I click an executable file from the download manager. The warning they give is unobtrusive enough that I like having it there.

But I really only want to give the answer once. I don't care for software that asks me the same question three times simply because it happens to have three layers of abstraction that don't communicate well with each other about security.

I think UAC is still a work in progress. (The name seems to change about as often as new CTPs come out for example - it's no longer called UAP.)

I know that one of the *goals* of the whole UAC drive is to significantly reduce the number of places in which you need elevation to get things done.

Right now they seem to be in a sort of half-way house. The elevation is somewhat in-your-face. (Although not really significantly worse than the non-admin life in XP - you have to elevate manually there at least as often in my experience.)

The goal is to move towards elevation as being a fairly unusual thing. But what troubles me is whether they'll have time to finish that, now that we're supposed to be quite close to release...

The example you've linked to here looks to me like a combination of two problems: 1) unfinished integration of UAC into the user experience and 2) the fact that in 5270, the shell prompts are all over the place.

Anyone who's made any serious attempt to use build 5270 will know that the shell is barely useable on this build. They seem to be in the process of revamping lots of stuff, including prompts like this. But it all seems a long way from done. (My personal favourite is the new conflict resolution dialog that lets you choose what to do when a copy or move would overwrite a file - it shows identical icons for both files, with no way of telling which is which, and asks you to choose which one to keep...)

So this just seems like a typical example of how they've not finished joining the dots yet.

I sure hope they finish it before shipping...