Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttt_ | Hacker News Reader

>> Clearly, in order to get Task Manager running on your desktop with your credentials, winlogon needs to change its security context, change desktops, and then launch taskmgr.exe.

My question then would be why is that option even present on the "wrong security context"? I don't really see how it fits the other options present in that context. It's probably there just because they felt bad alienating the users that were used to the shortcut.

So they creep in functionality into a well known keyboard shortcut, then make the well known original functionality worst because of the new functionality. Then enters this guy and blames you for doing it wrong.

View on HN

If winlogon runs in the same security context and the same desktop as explorer.exe then a key logger will be able to intercept all logins, and a screenshotter will be able to take screenshots of your login screen. Clearly you don't want that to be possible.

Or are you saying that they never should have made Ctrl-Alt-Del do anything else but starting the task manager?

>> Or are you saying that they never should have made Ctrl-Alt-Del do anything else but starting the task manager?

That's what I'm saying. Not that they shouldn't have made it do anything else per se. But that by doing so, the other features caused a negative effect on the main feature.

Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't have anything to do with logon or accounts or security, just task manager. Winlogon stuff should have had a different shortcut altogether, maybe Win-Alt-Del.

Wikipedia has more details, but essentially, in the Windows NT line bringing up all the security options has always been what Ctrl-Alt-Del does, with the task manager sometimes being presented as an option. Since about 1993.

Jumping straight to the task manager was something that happened under limited circumstances (fast user switching enabled, computer unattached to a domain) in Windows XP only.

So you can kill a locked up full screen application. Or any application happens to have fubar'd your entire desktop session. Happens all the time on windows.

In that case, couldn't Ctrl-Alt-Del try first in the current context, and in failing recur to the winlogon context?

I suppose it could. But i think the power of Ctrl-Alt-Del is that it switches to a different desktop (and context), as long as your graphics driver isn't borked, it should work.

Its basically the same idea as Ctrl-Alt-F2 dumping you to a different tty on a linux box even if X crashes. To my knowledge windows doesn't support that type of "multiple tty/desktop" sessions per user so rather than switching ttys within a single user context they have to switch to the system context.

Not saying its ideal, but rather just that access to the task manager is in there for this reason primarily, at least as far I can figure out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com