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Microsoft to Improve User Access Control in Windows 7

I was just reading a Slashdot article about Microsoft improving User Access Control (UAC) in Windows 7. In the cited PC Pro article, Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi says:

We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated. You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.

It seems that Microsoft engineers do have a good grasp on the issues that users have with Windows Vista. On the other hand, CEO Steve Ballmer doesn’t seem to have a clue:

the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I’m not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.

Ummm, yeah… Mr. Ballmer, you sacrificed security for usability not compatibility. I suspect he’s probably still running Windows XP on his desktop, so he really has no idea what he’s talking about. The compatibility issues with Vista have little to do with UAC. Vista’s compatibility problems pale in comparison to the usability issues that UAC introduced.
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Microsoft Following Google into the Clouds

As part of Google’s 10th anniversary, last month there was a post on the Official Google Blog about the future of cloud computing. Just a couple of weeks later, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer made remarks about a new operating system Microsoft is developing that he called Windows Cloud. Ballmer states that the official announcement of the product will be coming within a month.
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Play Wii DVDR Backups without a Modchip

Back in July of this year, bushing over at Hackmii announced that he had identified a potential security issue that would allow pirated games Wii games to be played on an unmodified Wii console.  It appears that Nintendo did respond to his post and he has since begun a dialogue with them to explain his findings.  It seems that now bushing is not the only one to have identify an exploit for playing DVD backups on an unmodded Wii.  WiiGator at Tehskeen not only found an exploit, but he took it a step further and released a backup launcher complete with source code.  Read More »Play Wii DVDR Backups without a Modchip