Re: [ros-dev] dealing with insecure-by-inattention Windows software

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 11:50 +0100, Jasper van de Gronde wrote:
>   Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> >   On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 17:19 +0100, Jasper van de
> > Gronde wrote:
> >  
> > >  Are you saying that with Vista it's possible
> > > to give a program its own 
> > > virtual view of the system which it can read and modify to its heart's 
> > > content without affecting other programs? That would be simply divine. 
> >  
> >  Yes, although IME, it doesn't work out so well, yet.
> >  
> >  I just posted on that in this thread, as well.  There are more bad
> >  things that happen as a result. 
>  
>  Apart from obvious problems with giving users enough rights to do common 
>  tasks, which isn't something I'm terribly worried about in my situation 
>  (I'm pretty much the only one who should be doing anything mildly 
>  advanced anyway), could you point out something that goes wrong? I'd 
>  assume that if an application has its own virtual view of the filesystem 
>  and registry (that it could read and potentially modify) that most 
>  applications would work reasonably well. 
Well, for starters:

	* Applications which previously had settings in other places didn't
work so well because of the new "virtualization" technique.
	* Things like Nero didn't work at all without new software (similar to
a sudo sort of thing for Windows, but a bigger pain in the ass to
install and manage).
	* Computer Administrators weren't administrators, so the Control Panels
didn't work.
	* Trying to run anything that requested a low-level access of any type
didn't work very well.  This included the special config programs that
came with my video board and sound card.  The programs would load, but
none of their functionality would work.

In addition:

	* Some programs are now 'hard-wired' to use locations like C:\Documents
and Settings\current_user.  This is not present any longer in Vista.
This should probably be a bug against the application, however, since %
USERHOME% (I think) is defined stating where the user's home area is.
The new area is %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Users\current_user, or something like
that.
	* Vista is most assuredly not well versed in the upgrade from "legacy"
Windows (e.g., XP) to itself.  It didn't work.  It didn't virtualize the
registry as it should've.  This is something that hopefully they fix
soon.
	* Something changed in the way you can store temp files, even.  This
was fairly evident by the fact that some things (such as program
installers) failed to run as anything but the Administrator.  That was
HIGHLY annoying.
	* I couldn't uninstall programs that I'd installed under my user
account in XP, under Vista.

It's almost like having no rights, whatsoever.  At least with UNIX, it's
all good game if you stay in your home directory and don't exceed your
disk quota, and play by the rules of the system set by the SA.

	- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                     fd0man(a)gmail.com

"Why geeks like computers: unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount,
fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep."  :-)