To Users That Know Enough To Be Dangerous,
Let’s start out with a really simple point. It’s one of those points that you know everybody knows, but chooses to ignore. You don’t own your work computer unless you own the company. It is not yours. It was given to you to use to get your work done. It is not a violation of your rights to put restrictions on the computer since it is not yours. Since we have basically no employment law anyway, you should assume that you’re always under surveillance when you’re at work. I don’t agree with this, I’m just being realistic. Plus you hardly even react to the fact that you are under constant surveillance at home and at work anyway whether you are an administrator on the computer or not. Don’t tell me that not making you an admin means that you can’t get your work done. In 99% of cases I can find a way to make your programs run, and let you get your work done, without making you an admin and you know it. It’s a lame excuse so stop. To those less tech savvy let’s just say that an administrator can make any change to the computer. In a group environment an administrator can make changes that give them access to everyone else’s information on that machine or any machine that they are an admin on, for example. This means that your boss, let’s say a professor at college, has access to your entire profile. That professor can be under survelliance all the live long day, but may get upset if someone does remote work on their system without telling them?! So it’s totally ok with them that eveyone that uses their system as admins, or anyone that can log in against a domain and get admin access, can access anything they want in their account, but up yours if you try to fix the thing remotely and forget to tell them. It’s time to wake up. The person fixing your computer is not the problem. The brass collecting data on you is. Making yourself an admin will not keep your company out of your files, and in most cases this is reasonable since you work for them. If you want to look at porn on your computer, use your own, except in very rare cases you should not be doing this at work and even if you use your own computer, if you are doing this at work, your Media Access Controller (MAC address which identifies your specific network card), IP Address, and the names of the sites you are visiting are probably being recorded anyway. The only thing you are doing by demanding administrator access is allowing the sites you are visiting to corrupt your computer and require more maintenance. You are not protecting your privacy so stop claiming academic freedom, etc. Academic freedom says that you can look at things that are relevant to your work, even if that material is offensive, but not if it’s illegal. If your computer becomes infected with Spyware because you visited “SuperHorseFucker.com” your IT guys will know that you went there when they clean up the computer. Sure corrupt bosses may tell you to look the other way when you clean up a prominent professor’s computer and all of the infections they have come from hardcore porn sites, but I think we all know that unless we work in the porn industry we shouldn’t be doing this stuff at work anyway. If you need a specific program someone can install it quickly, and remotely for you or simply include it during setup. By not being an admin at work your computer simply will not become a hazard to you, and the entire network. If your IT department disagrees with me, you need new management, and they need some backbone.
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” — Spock
It’s true: Most users on Windows, OS X, and Linux do NOT need to be administrators. In fact, in newer versions of all three operating systems, even administrators do not have full rights when they are just using the system. In most cases, administrative tasks require an extra authentication: They must enter their password, or click a dialog box, or any number of things. This is specifically added to the operating system so that you DON’T break it accidentally.
Apple had several ads mocking Vista’s admittedly annoying UAC dialogs. These UAC dialogs highlighted exactly how often companies required admin rights for tasks that didn’t really need them. For those of you who noticed UAC popups for games and non-administrative applications, this was not Vista’s fault, but rather lazy programming practices that used elevated rights where they weren’t needed. These practices created larger security holes for malicious programs to exploit and caused users to be comfortable with ignoring security warnings.
In Windows 7, these dialogs have been greatly reduced as developers moved to coding their applications correctly. At this point, I have to click “allow” on Windows 7 about as often as I have to type in my password and click OK on Ubuntu 9.10 or OS X. Both Linux and OS X require your password for some tasks, like installing software or running updates or changing network or user settings. Windows only requires clicking Allow if you are an admin, but this can be changed to require you actual credentials just like the Unix-based / Unix-like systems.
P.S: 007, the domain superhorsefucker.com is still available if you want it…