• Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    I use to think if I opened Explorer as an administrator I could turn off the parental controls my mom put on the computer 😂

  • yesman@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s funny that elevation of permissions is something handled elegantly in Linux since forever, but M$ just can’t make it happen.

    UAC is slow, ineffective, and inconsistent. But even when you turn it off you find some directories are off limits still. Even while you can vandalize regedit and gpedit all day long.

    The “hello Windows” system of pins and bio-metrics may be an improvement, IDK. I liked using a PIN for logins and stuff right up until I needed the real password for something.

    Or maybe that’s the problem: the fact that M$ handles elevation of permission in 6 different and contradictory ways that all have to be backward comparable.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      19 hours ago

      . . .6 different and contradictory ways that all have to be backward comparable.

      After witnessing their handling of Control Panel vs. “trendy no-option we-think-you’re-stupid Control Panel” for like 4 straight versions, I think this has just become their philosophy at this point. Lol

      • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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        16 hours ago

        I was just forced to upgrade at work. There are still number of dependencies to the old style of settings, but they’ve done great job on the new panel for the most part.
        Everything is in one place, no longer do we have dozen different modals for everything, it makes a lot more sense, provides more information about devices.
        It’s obviously a lot of work, but I think they’re taking it in the right direction.

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Relatedly unrelated…

      Back in the day when I was running Windows 7, I had an incident that caused some minor file system corruption. Honestly I can’t blame Windows itself, turned out I had a couple bad capacitors, which I replaced.

      But the file system corruption? Oh boy that was ever so simple, but still totally borked the entire system!

      The Event Log files lost all permissions, even System level permissions, and CHKDSK wasn’t having any of that even…

      Windows gets really fucking pissy when the event log doesn’t work.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    We’ve had 24 years of UAC and somehow Microsoft still can’t figure out either of the following:

    1. The UAC prompt is triggered by an application either directly requesting elevation, or attempting to do something (write a file, tweak a registry value, change a group policy setting) that requires said permissions. So the OS obviously knows whatever it was the application tried to do, but it doesn’t tell you what that is. It just says it needs to make “changes to your device.” I would feel a lot better about that if they bothered to inform me maybe which file or directory it was trying to write to, or if it’s a registry change, or what. Because, you know, maybe I don’t want to let randomdownloadedapp32.exe change my system language to Swahili if I knew that’s what it was about to do.

    2. There still isn’t a way to permanently mark a specific app or executable as trusted so it won’t nag you about UAC elevation. If you’re running an account with limited permissions and need to enter an administrator password every single time you launch some damn fool program, for instance, that’s a big time problem for your peons who may accidentally close that application at any time and then can’t reopen it. The workarounds for this (if any) typically revolve around divining whatever action that app performs that’s got Windows’ knickers in a twist, rather akin to guessing what a fussy baby is crying about, and then manually applying permissions to that file, directory, or object. Maybe it’s trying to write to %systemdrive%\Program Files? Maybe it’s keeping a count of something in the registry? Did it try to change a protected system setting like, ye gods forbid, the clock? Did it trip Windows’ built in installer detection? Or maybe it just blithely demands an elevated runtime for no reason because its developers were morons. I don’t fucking know, because the UAC prompt doesn’t tell you; See point #1 above.

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      it just blithely demands an elevated runtime for no reason because its developers were morons.

      It’s always, always, this one.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
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      1 day ago

      What is interesting to me is that Steam somehow manages to run elevated commands when installing games and it, itself, never actually gives any UAC warnings and even kinda breaks if you force Steam to run as an admin from the compatibility tab.

      • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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        14 hours ago

        I’d hazard a gueas it’s not touching a system drive, but rather saving all files as a regular user.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Unfortunately, I think the explanation for this one is that Steam bypasses a lot of Windows security and can be used as an exploration vector.