Annoying UAC beaten with a shovel!

A non-profit organisation, NeoSmart, claims to have bypassed Vista’s User Access Control. On Sunday they posted an article on their website which suggests that UAC has only been added as ‘annoyance-ware’ - I made that word up. Will it carry? To be fair, I think any of you that use Vista are already aware that this feature is pretty useless. In my opinion, the prompt that you receive should be more along the lines of: “Do want to run this software even though it might turn your machine into a useless lump of plastic and metal?”. Back to the article.

The system was designed to be broken!

Yes, you read that the subtitle right. Critics have said that, by bypassing UAC, NeoSmart are doing feature was doing as Microsoft intended - Yeah, let’s spend about $10 billion dollars on product with tightly integrated security features. The best part is that we want the security to be bypassed! It’s an odd world.curity”.

As you may know, UAC was designed to stop the installation or execution of dangerous code. I think most people will agree that it’s more of a hindrance. The constant requests for confirmation of trivial tasks make this a contender for ‘annoyance-ware of the year’ award.

Lowdown

NeoSmart have developed iReboot. This that helps users decide which OS they would like to reboot into. UAC caught the application at startup and  stopped it from running. Using some dark coding arts, the NeoSmart eggheads worked around this issue by splitting iReboot two. One of the parts, a background process, runs privileged access to the operating system. This does not require administrator approval at boot time. The second component runs as a client program and talks to the background service. This allows the code to run without invoking UAC.

There’s not much more I can say. Another hole or simply Microsoft having some fun to the tune of $10 billion. You work it out.

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