As a follow up to yesterday's LUA post, I want to point you to a post from Wintellog on LUA. John points to an article on adminfoo.net and eWeek. The eWeek article is interesting because they took 3 logins (admin, power user and user) and did some surfing and, well, here's a quick quote:
Look at the results table from a eWeek article where their test labs ran as an Administrator, Power User, and User and "visited a series of less-than-savory Web sites in an effort to install various types of adware and spyware bundlers." The results are amazing. On Windows XP SP2, the Administrator and Power Users accounts had 16 detected threats. The User had zero! Do you believe all of us clamoring for everyone to run as LUA now?
Holy crap. I thought it was a good idea, but here's the proof in the chocolate pudding!
Yeah, it isn't the easiest thing to get used to, and yeah, some apps don't play nice with LUA, but, maybe that could be the fault of the vendors who are making software that has no real need to access admin areas (registry, windows system folders, etc..) and not the principle of LUA?
If you were waiting for the one compelling reason to quit running as admin, I think the eWeek article is it.
If you still don't switch after reading the article, you deserve every piece of spyware you get (even those you don't even know you picked up) and your internet connection should be taken away, permanently. I wish upon you every virus, spyware, mal-ware, and syphilis too.
For those of us that *do* run LUA, it's up to you to convert the stubborn. Their laziness, or stubbornness, or whatever is still propagating this crap throughout the internet, and if you think the other 10000000000 people running admin, sharing spyware and viruses with each other are not affecting you, think again. That crap is still bogging down *your* internet, the whole web, even though you aren't infected.
Here's the article : http://wintellect.com/WEBLOGS/wintellect/archive/2006/02/08/2492.aspx