Microsoft’s director of program management for Windows security David Cross, was the group program manager in charge of designing the User Account Control (UAC). UAC is an annoying feature in Windows Vista designed to limit a program’s access to the rest of the system, software by default will not have administrator level access to the entire system.In the early days of Vista’s release this was a problem because a lot of the software at the time (which was designed for Windows XP) would have a fit if it did not have the appropriate access and UAC would ask to “allow” or “deny” it or to simply “cancel” the action.

Many felt that there were too many UAC dialog messages when users tried to carry out common tasks such as moving files around the system or dragging an icon from the desktop to the recycle bin

Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, on Thursday, David Cross is reported on ZDnet as saying:

“The reason we put UAC into the [Vista] platform was to annoy users — I’m serious” he then continued “Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run.”

Cross claimed that annoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code.

The UAC feature can be turned off, although unadvisable. It is always nice to know why a feature is added and the reasons behind it, typical Microsoft!

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