I am not surprised at all by this "revelation". One of Windows's great faults has been that users default to an omnipotent Admin account. I applaud that MS is finally forcing its users to do their everyday work at a safer security level. But, as this report indicates, it isn't just the users who have gotten used to running Windows in Admin mode... There's no good reason that so many applications need to run in Admin mode other than the programmers were lazy. Well, I can be "lazy" too and switch to another program that doesn't trigger the UAC security measures.
Linux (or, more appropriately, Unix) must have gone through similar growing pains back in the day. Why else would there be a "reverse UAC" in the form of SUDO? But these security issues/solutions that we've come to accept in *nix must have caused similar problems back in the day. I don't think there's much historical record about it because it happened so long ago (in the short history of computing), and the majority of the *nix operators would have _wanted_ the tighter security.
Discussion on:
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