>As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together.

What a great new perspective.

But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.

I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.

All UAC ever did was further re-enforce the already deeply-ingrained MS convention of 'just click OK' without reading the dialog. It never told you why the program needed elevated access, only that it needed it for it to do what you wanted. And of course, the average user just wants their computer to do what they asked. I would see some users run a program and automatically move their mouse to the place the UAC prompt would appear, seconds before the prompt ever came up. That's a whole new level of programming people.

The only time I can think it ever came in handy was if the user had an unprivileged account and would need an admin to type in the password - hopefully the admin would ask the why question and dig into it before dismissing the UAC prompt.

Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".