<nessuno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1156432185.821275.85500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Oliver Wong wrote:
"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2508831.t9j3eQyBRG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> __/ [ Oliver Wong ] on Wednesday 23 August 2006 21:59 \__
>
>> I think something that Thompson may be glossing over is that a lot
>> of
>> users don't really care all that much about security. Or more
>> precisely,
>> security is a nice thing to have, but they'd prefer convenience and
>> ease
>> of
Speaking of ease of use, there is an article in another recent post
("Windows User Describes Vista and IE7 as Usability Decline") that
speaks of the inconvenience of all the security warnings in Vista.
This article is rather sober, and it is not the first time this issue
has been raised by Vista testers. Vista is only beta, of course, and
Microsoft is apparently trying to reconcile security with convenience
before the production release. But the possibility remains (as
discussed in the article) that all the security popups will cause a
significant decline in convenience, perhaps defeating their purpose.
It may be impossible to reconcile security with convenience as well on
Windows Vista as is currently the case with OS X, given the nature of
the beast.
I think Windows can certainly improve in the security department without
too much hinderance on usability. First of all, all of those "critical
vulnerabilities" where machines get owned without any user interaction...
any fixes to these would surely not affect usability at all. Your computer
would behave exactly the same as far as you're concerned (no extra
confirmation dialogs, etc.), except it would just be more secure.
Running as non-root is currently painful in Windows, but it should be
possible to fix that without too much usability hinderance either. Many
games require root access to run, and that just doesn't make sense. For
installing drivers and such, it'd be nice if they mimicked the Debian
(Ubuntu?) systems I've seen and make it impossible (or difficult?) to log in
as root, requiring you to use sudo instead. OSX implements this approach
well, IMHO.
- Oliver
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