Reacting to intense criticism of an important security feature in Windows 7, Microsoft Corp. today said it will change the behavior of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7's release candidate.
"We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that we'll all see," said John DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two Microsoft executives responsible for Windows' development.
"First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation," said DeVaan and Sinofsky. "Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation."
The changes, they said, were prompted by feedback from users, including comments appended to an earlier post Thursday by DeVaan in which he defended the modifications Microsoft made to UAC in Windows 7.
"Our dialog is at that point where many do not feel listened to and also many feel various viewpoints are not well-informed," DeVaan and Sinofsky said in the later blog post. "That's not the dialog we set out to have and we're going to do our best to improve."
The UAC feature, which debuted in 2007 as part of Windows Vista but was altered to reduce the number of prompts in Windows 7, has been under fire since last week, when two Windows bloggers, Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng, first reported that it could easily be disabled by attackers.
Yesterday, they followed up with more information about how hackers could piggyback on UAC-approved applications to fool Windows 7 into giving a malicious payload full administrative rights.
"This is definitely the result we've been looking for," Long said in an e-mail late Thursday. "[But] I'm a little bit shocked at just how quickly Microsoft has turned around, considering they made a post not 12 hours earlier stating that they would not change their position."
Rivera, Long and others urged Microsoft to reconsider the default setting of UAC in Windows 7. That default, which DeVaan said Microsoft had selected because people running Windows balked at dealing with more than two security prompts per day, was to "Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer."
Microsoft, however, won't be taking that tack. Instead, the next public version of Windows 7 -- dubbed RC, for release candidate -- will prompt the user before allowing any changes to UAC settings. "The way we're going to think about this [is] that the UAC setting is something like a password, and to change your password you need to enter your old password," DeVaan and Sinofsky said today.
Microsoft has not spelled out a Windows 7 RC timetable, but Sinofsky reiterated last week that the development process was moving straight from the public beta, which was launched Jan. 10, to the release candidate. In the past, the company has delivered multiple betas before moving to the RC milestone.
The other change to be implemented in Windows 7 RC will effectively render moot the proof-of-concept attack that Rivera and Long published last week, which silently disables UAC. "That was already in the works before this discussion and doing this prevents all the mechanics around SendKeys and the like from working," DeVaan and Sinofsky said.
They didn't issue an apology for the dust-up, but said Microsoft had erred when deciding how to implement UAC in Windows 7. "We said we thought we were bound to make a mistake in the process of designing and blogging about Windows 7."
"We want to continue the dialog and hopefully everyone recognizes that engineering, perhaps especially engineering Windows 7, is sometimes going to be a lively discussion with a broad spectrum of viewpoints," they said.
One security professional praised Microsoft's move. "This goes back to what beta programs are supposed to provide: feedback from a real audience," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.
"This was an obvious design flaw, and for them to say they simply weren't going to fix it, that was the real problem," Storms said. "I think they realized that they needed to do something, more over the concern about their reaction than to the vulnerability itself."
Source : www.computerworld.com
Showing posts with label Windows 7 News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows 7 News. Show all posts
Windows 7 Build 6956 Leaked !!!
The first version of Windows 7 that leaked to various P2P networks was the released handed out at the Professional Developer Conference. The latest leak of build 6956 of Windows 7 happened during the WinHEC 2008 conference in Beijing. The release made its way on various torrent websites from where it can be downloaded. It is not supplied in ISO format but as a Virtual Hard Disk image. To run that image you would need one of the following programs: Virtual Server 2005, Hyer-V HyperVisor or Windows 7 Disk Management.
Another possibility that is outlined would be the following:
extract HEC.rar, you can get a .VHD image.
Use WinMount3, extract .VHD image to a new ntfs disk.
Use VistaBootPro, add the disk to your boot menu.
see also :
Windows 7 - the next Windows
Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is the next release of Microsoft Windows, an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, Tablet PCs, and media center PCs.
Microsoft's Ben Fathi stated on 9 February 2007 that the focus of the operating system was still being worked out, and he could only hint at some possibilities:
“We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors. I don't know what it is [...] Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”
Microsoft's Hilton Locke stated on his blog that touch features are going to be central.
“I will say that if you are impressed by the 'touch features' in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.”
Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, suggested that the next version of Windows would "be more user-centric." When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:
“That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.”
Gates later said that Windows 7 will also focus on performance improvements:
“We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don't have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.”
Senior Vice President Bill Veghte stated that Windows 7 will not have the kind of compatibility issues with Vista that Vista has with previous versions:
“You've let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward.”
Speaking about Windows 7 on 16 October 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed compatibility between Vista and Windows 7:
“Our next release of Windows will be compatible with Vista. The key is let’s get on with it. We’ll be ready when you want to deploy Windows 7.”
Ballmer also confirmed the relationship between Vista and Windows 7, indicating that Windows 7 will be an improved version of Vista.
Microsoft aims Windows 7 release for 2009 holiday season
Taken from news.cnet.com by Ina Fried
The slides and Howe's presentation appeared to confirm what has been widely speculated--but something Microsoft has not outright said--namely that Windows 7 is aimed to ship around mid-year, in time to be on machines that ship for the 2009 holiday buying season. After the session, Howe essentially confirmed that Microsoft is aiming Windows 7 for the holidays.
"Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7," Howe told me.
Microsoft's Ben Fathi stated on 9 February 2007 that the focus of the operating system was still being worked out, and he could only hint at some possibilities:
“We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors. I don't know what it is [...] Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”
Microsoft's Hilton Locke stated on his blog that touch features are going to be central.
“I will say that if you are impressed by the 'touch features' in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.”
Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, suggested that the next version of Windows would "be more user-centric." When asked to clarify what he meant, Gates said:
“That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.”
Gates later said that Windows 7 will also focus on performance improvements:
“We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don't have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.”
Senior Vice President Bill Veghte stated that Windows 7 will not have the kind of compatibility issues with Vista that Vista has with previous versions:
“You've let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward.”
Speaking about Windows 7 on 16 October 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed compatibility between Vista and Windows 7:
“Our next release of Windows will be compatible with Vista. The key is let’s get on with it. We’ll be ready when you want to deploy Windows 7.”
Ballmer also confirmed the relationship between Vista and Windows 7, indicating that Windows 7 will be an improved version of Vista.
Microsoft aims Windows 7 release for 2009 holiday season
Taken from news.cnet.com by Ina Fried
The slides and Howe's presentation appeared to confirm what has been widely speculated--but something Microsoft has not outright said--namely that Windows 7 is aimed to ship around mid-year, in time to be on machines that ship for the 2009 holiday buying season. After the session, Howe essentially confirmed that Microsoft is aiming Windows 7 for the holidays.
"Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7," Howe told me.
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