Remember the PC vs. Mac commercial that had Mac say "Hi PC" and a third guy in a Secret Service suit said to PC "Mac issued a greeting; accept or reject?" It went on and on, every step of the dialogue filtered through the security thug.
It was a funny commercial, and it made a lot of sense if you were frustrated by that feature of windows.
But if you understand what's going on in Vista with that pop-up message, you might have more appreciation for it.
The Usser Account Control feature is what is responsible for those messages. When you start functions that could change your system, you are asked by the UAC if you are sure you want to do this.
A natural response is to get frustrated and huff "I clicked it! Of course I want to continue."
But everyone knows about "malware," right? It is the term to refer to malicious software written to take advantage of you and your system. And of course Spyware, which reports on your activities without your knowledge, and then there are viruses, trojan horses, etc.
Well these nefarious programs don't pop up a nice splash screen when they start with a title and a short description. You never see the "Welcome to the I LOVE YOU Trojan" screen. They just start up and run as quietly as possible, stealing your passwords, mailing screenshots of your bank account info back to the hacker who wrote it, taking part in Denial of Service attacks against other machines.
Enter the UAC. If one of these programs starts up and tries to do it's thing in Vista, the UAC will stop *everything* and ask you "Hey, this program is trying to run and change some of your system settings. Do you really want to allow that?"
Oh...that's what that's for. Doesn't seem like such a bad thing then, eh?
Yeah, it was marketing genius playing upon the ignorance of the common man. But once you understand, it looks a little different.
No comments:
Post a Comment