Windows 7 UAC: no exceptions, please

I really, really, hope that this is just a beta/release candidate issue... or rather a misconfiguration. Anticompetitiveness (questionable... things may break otherwise) aside, this is a pretty major security issue. I'm not quite sure why DEP (data execution protection) isn't catching this... again, hopefully default settings will be adjusted so that this won't be possible in the final version. I really, really hope so, otherwise we're back to the Windows XP security model.

They key to security is simplicity, believe it or not, and having exceptions in something like UAC or DEP that you can't control is just not a good idea. No other OS on the market (OS X, Linux, BSD) does this. On the contrary, Linux and BSD have mechanisms to make privilege escalation even more difficult (e.g. can't take advantage of "rootly" powers even if you are root).

This is definitely not an issue for corporate/business users, they will lock things down before deployment, but will hardware vendors, like Dell, Lenovo and HP, do the same? What about folks that buy Windows 7 off the shelf?

http://www.osnews.com/story/21499/Why_Windows_7_s_Default_UAC_Is_Insecure