mildly interesting stuff

There has been a large amount of confusion and concern out there about Vista’s new user security model (Everybody runs as Standard User, a new user account security construct, UAC, acts as gatekeeper of process security boundaries - a doorway to process security context elevation).

Users should be in control of what executes on their system under Admin (full trust, highest privilege) context. User Account Control was created to enable users to prevent or allow a process  to run in an elevated way (which simply means that the process can successfully execute code that can do core system operations).

In this interview we tackle UAC from various angles:

1) What problems does UAC attempt to solve?
2) How does UAC actually work?
3) Why did we implement UAC UI to be so aggressive, from a user experience point of view?
4) How will UAC evolve?

Here, Jon Schwartz, UAC Architect, and Chris Corio, UAC Technical Program Manager, discuss, in detail, the history of UAC, the architecture and design of UAC, the new security model of Vista (we are all Standard Users (gone are the days of running as Admin by default on Windows), what happens when a UAC security dialog is invoked, how UAC impacts developers, how UAC will evolve…

Enjoy this latest episode of Going Deep.