> Badly designed applications have nothing to do with Vista or greater's "security architecture", so that leaves UAC. We agree, from a technical point of view.

> Badly designed applications have nothing to do with Vista or greater's "security architecture", so that leaves UAC. We agree, from a technical point of view. OTOH, applications are the system, from a user's point of view, and Windows has "taught" programmers to write applications which run under high privileges. A Windows program requiring administrative privileges to run is not seen as defective: just disable UAC and it works flawlessly ;-) I guess a similar behaving OS X or Linux program would not have it that easy. > Do you feel UAC has a worse security design than the privilege escalation mechanism on OS X? I don't know about OS X. Linux user here. If we look at it as techies, UAC is sound. If we look at it as average users, it is not. It's an usability issue. > Or - since you mention teaching end users - are you talking about a user education issue? Exactly. I think that a safe usage of a Windows system requires too much education. That's it.