Microsoft Says Other OSes Should Imitate UAC

I find this incredibly amusing. From Slashdot on Tuesday May 01:

Many Vista adopters find User Account Control irritating, but Microsoft thinks it's an approach other OSes should emulate. Microsoft Australia's Chief Security Adviser Peter Watson calls UAC a great idea and 'strategically a direction that all operating systems and all technologies should be heading down.' He also believes Microsoft is charting new territory with UAC. 'The most controversial aspect of Watson's comments all center around the idea that Microsoft is a leader with UAC, and that other OSes should follow suit. UAC is a cousin of myriad "superuser" process elevation strategies, of which Mac OS X and all flavors of Linux already enjoy. The fact is that Microsoft is late to the party with their Microsoftized version of sudo. That's really what UAC is, after all: sudo with a fancy display mechanism (to make it hard to spoof) and extra monitoring to pick up on "suspicious" behavior.'

The latter part of the above quote is from the ArsTechnica article author, Ken Fisher, and completely nails it on the head. Good read if you have a minute, and understand a little about how privileged user access works in the *nix world. Ubuntu, as comparison, comes with sudo access already enabled, and no root password - actually defaults to no root login. You do everything from your own account, and when you try to access something that may actually AFFECT THE SYSTEM (i.e. not just changing the freaking font) then it prompts for a password. Oh, and if you've entered a password for sudo access recently it won't prompt again. The root user can be enabled by providing it with a password if you so desire.

And funny how this capability has existed within Linux and even Unix for far longer than Windows Vista has, or even Windows NT... yet this is "charting new territory..."