Friday 26 September 2008

Why Aaron Removes Admin Rights

Talk about kernel-mode rootkit phobia!

Aaron Margosis the "anti-admin" of Microsoft wants to take away the freedom of operating Windows with full admin rights. The core of Aaron's expurgation is that though we may feel we use our machines responsibly, "things happen". Stay away from me, kernel-mode rootkits!

(Kernel-mode rootkits ARE the root of evil though. Imagine being able to access any address and execute any instruction. Yikes!)

Recently Microsoft's remove-power-from-user attitude has been giving me UAC grief in Vista. Exhibit A: A referral was returned from the server" and application fails to start! (VISTA) This indicates a UAC denial. What was I trying to do? Hack my own mailbox p'raps? Well, if you want a program to run with elevated privileges in Vista, it must be marked as such in the application's manifest file. This applies to managed .NET code.

Read up on UAC in Vista here.

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