Justin du Coeur (jducoeur) wrote,
Justin du Coeur
jducoeur

[PROGRAMMING] Okay, now I'm just getting annoyed

The big deal with Windows XP Service Pack 2 was that it was supposed to be more "secure". In practice, it's just irritating. I'm now getting stupid popups all over the place. It insists on asking me for explicit permission before opening an emailed log file. (Despite clearly knowing that it's a text file, since saying "yes" simply opens the file in Notepad.) It demands permission to run programs that I installed quite explicitly. It wouldn't even let eRoom run at all, until I went in through the back door to figure out why the icon was now dead, and re-enable the relevant web pages.

Grr. Haven't these people ever heard of permission fatigue? It's been well-known for many years that if you stick enough popups in peoples' faces, they will simply start answering "yes" without thinking about it. Good security isn't about demanding explicit permission for every little operation, it's about paying attention to what's actually important. This is just ass-covering. ("Oh, but you gave *permission* for that virus to eat your hard drive, so obviously it isn't our fault...")
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