What do you think? Why can’t MS do what a single open source developer has done?

Is it really that hard to implement a sudo style jail that can figure out basic user intent? If I open a dialog and decide to edit preferences in it prompt me and then don’t prompt me for that application again for a set period of time. Prompts are good, but crying wolf for every little detail is just as bad as allowing backdoors because your program managers are lazy.

The injection stuff only works if you’re running in admin-approval mode. If you’re doing over-the-shoulder elevation then nothing can silently created elevated “blessed” MS COM objects, not even Microsoft’s “blessed” executables like Explorer.exe, MSPaint.exe, Calc.exe, etc. Nothing can silently elevate at all. Same as if you turn UAC up to the always-prompt level, which gets you back to what was the default in Vista.

Switching to standard user accounts and over-the-shoulder elevation cannot be what Microsoft seriously expect people to do, though.

By adding silent elevation methods for their own code MS are acknowledging that Vista’s admin-approval UAC prompts were too annoying for too many users. (IMO, most of that annoyance was really due to the way Explorer etc. trigger far too many prompts, not the prompts themselves, but MS have chosen to give themselves a dodgy backdoor rather than refactor their code like everyone else is expected to, which is pathetic.)

Over-the-shoulder elevation is even more annoying than admin-approval mode, since you have to keep typing passwords instead of simply clicking buttons, so it’s hard to imagine MS seriously expect people to switch to that.