Java flaw could lead to Windows, Linux attacks

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What is your defn of day to day work?

If you are trying to format the hard drive every day, okay, you may have problems. Let's just go down the list of apps that I (and 99.9% of users) use day to day at home:
1. Outlook: Can create mail accounts, save settings, read mail, send mail, haven't ever needed to log in as admin other than when I installed Office.
2. Word/Excel: ditto. I suppose if you wanted to save your Word/Excel files as c:\windows\system32\kernel32.dll, then you are right, you can't do that without admin privileges.
3. Money: Never had any problems doing anything here. I've created new files, backed up existing ones. Yup, never ever needed to run as admin.
4. Firefox: Installed and ran as a regular user (the older versions anyway, I believe I did install the latest one as admin so all users could use it). Absolutely no problems saving bookmarks. Weird, guess I have a freaky computer!
5. Internet Spades: I can successfully play this game any time I want. I even changed from Beginner to Expert and it saved that preference without any issues.
6. Many, many, custom built programs: My programs access SQL server, save changes to the registry, write files to the user sections of the hard drive, and not one of them requires admin privileges. Odd, isn't it?
7. Play music: check. Rip mp3s: check. Burn CDs: check. Non require administrator permissions.
8. Print anything: check. Phew, that was close!
9. VS.NET. Okay, I could argue that this isn't a day to day task but for some people, it is. Check out this msdn article for how to run VS.NET from a non-administrative account:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/tchdevelopingsoftwareinvisualstudionetwithnon-administrativeprivileges.asp
A few of your developer tasks may need "Run As" but that is because they should need it. If you are trying to write to the system portion of the registry or the hard drive, you should be required to provide an administrator account. Besides, registering DLLs is becoming less and less necessary as .NET gains popularity. To be honest, I can write .NET programs using Notepad and csc.exe without ever requiring VS.NET or anything resembling administrator privileges.

So, your FUD about non admin accounts being only good for web surfing and not allowing you to save bookmarks is just that, FUD!

About how people USUALLY use Windows as administrator, I don't disagree and I never have. See my post just above where I talked about default security settings in Windows and Linux and whether or not they were appropriate. Saying that the default settings suck is not the same thing at all as saying that Windows is badly designed. Saying over and over again that most people use Windows improperly says nothing at all about what Windows CAN do. I have every reason to believe that if Linux was forced upon 99% of absolute computer neophytes, they would stop using their computer the first time they couldn't install a program or a patch because they forgot their root password. I don't like it and I wish that Windows defaulted to a regular user account but at least I'm not blinded enough by my ABM zealotry to believe that forcing a technical solution on a technically naive population is automatically the right answer.

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 11/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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