"Its official release is just under three months away, and Ubuntu 8.04, or Hardy Heron, promises some great improvements over the already user-friendly Ubuntu 7.10 (also known as Gusty Gibbon). This is a look at the fourth Alpha release of Hardy; including many of the applications that are now included by default and the major changes that will improve stability and usability. Among these are the addition of Firefox 3 and Remote Desktop on the applications side, and a new method for systems control known as Policy Kit, which enables the administrator to unlock certain functions for normal users."
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Member since:2006-08-09
Your captain obvious speaking: 
there is a reason, and there's only one reason, that Ubuntu is now showing their alphas with Remote Desktop and simple user administration simplified graphically:
Business.
This is going to be an "LTS". Somehow, somewhere, sometime, Canonical is going to have to make some money. They want support contracts with the typical MS Windows+Office workplace, as an alternative to a Vista migration (yes, I do have heard IT people talk about that in the hospital where I work).
Help desk management will ask, "we unlock people's account and change their passwords on a daily basis easily with Active Directory, and we use DameWare [or, insert here similar program] to take over people's desktops. You've got that, and it works well?"
They don't want to hear, well that's somewhere in our repositories. They want to hear, it's on top of the new and stable feature list - even if that comes down to the same thing.
Canonical is going to market this. Their usual simple approach might very well work, Shuttleworth is not an amateur. It's, in my humble opinion, not the user community lnx rulez fanboy crowd that these features are added by default for. 
Member since:
2005-07-01
Nope, as it says in the article, users will be able to unlock "certain functions" as well as fine tune user privalidges. There's no mention of a change to the default security configuration.
It does, however, seem to say that Remote Desktop will be enabled by default, which strikes me as less than totally secure. Though it appears (vulnerabilities aside) that any prospective hacker will need to wait for your express permission before taking over your machine.