I can't fault Microsoft's technical strategy in solving this problem. It's spot on. But something has to be done to strongly inspire the majority of software makers to comply or to make it a moot point whether they comply or not.
Account Setup
There's a small behavior Microsoft has introduced that I like a lot. The first time you create a new user account, Windows Vista insists that the account must have Administrator privileges. After you do that, the default Administrator account disappears from the consumer-oriented Welcome Screen login. This is Microsoft's way of trying to herd users away from using the default Administrator account. It's not serious protection, but getting us all away from using the same "Adminstrator" account with full Admin privileges makes it a little harder for malware programs to script full access to a computer.
In Beta 1, UAP is a feature you turn on or off. (Let's hope that option is preserved in the final version of Windows Vista.) One frustration I had with the feature is that when it's turned on, even accounts with full Administrator privileges are endlessly prompted to enter the login password to make changes to things Administrators normally have direct access to. This may be a bug of some sort. Let's hope so, because that functionality could be enough to cause some people to turn off UAP, or possibly to skip out on moving up to Windows Vista.
The success of Mozilla's Firefox finally spurred Microsoft to add tabbed browsing and basic RSS support to Internet Explorer 7.0, which is included in Windows Vista. As modest as those changes are, they make a big difference to the overall usability of the world's most widely used Web browser even in the rudimentary form they currently take in Beta 1.
Tabbed Browsing
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Internet Explorer 7.0's most important new feature, at least in Beta 1, is tabbed browsing. You click the square (shown as light blue because it's selected) to the right of the rightmost tab to add a new tab window. IE7's tabbed browsing could use a few more features and controls, but it works very well. Click to Enlarge |
The tabbed-browsing bar is the single most important feature in IE 7.0. When you launch the browser, it displays one wide browser tab containing your home page, with a small dark gray button to the right of the tab. To add a new tab, you click the gray button, which continues to appear just to the right of the right-most tab. This works well, but isn't obvious to new users. Microsoft will almost certainly build user-interface refinements to this basic functionality. As you add new tab windows, the width of all the tabs compresses, working something like the program buttons on the Windows Taskbar.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
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