Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Feb 2007 19:12 UTC
Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a 'very severe hole' in the design of UAC and found out - from Microsoft officials - that the default no-admin setting isn't even a security mechanism anymore. Rutkowska believes UAC has a major flaw in the way it automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
If you know what you're doing, rpm files can certainly be installed without admin privileges, to your home directory, or where ever. You may run into dependency problems of course, but like I say, it's not so bad if you know what you're doing.
At any rate, Windows installers are more akin to something like the Loki installer under Linux. There's absolutely no reason in my eyes why something like that would require admin priviliges. It's just silly programmers that don't know what they're doing is all. Or perhaps they know exactly what they're doing (think spyware etc).