Recent content by Skeptic Mike

So, how do you pass the identity (SID) of the user to the scheduled task? In this case you can use the scheduled task only for the part that requires elevation. But there are cases where you'd need to pass that information. I thought it might be possible by creating an event which logged the...

I've carefully made sure that the PCs I look after keep to a plain single colour lock screen. So I won't be testing this. What is interesting is that copilot assumes that ordinary users belong to the administrators group. If you use a separate administrative account, then the script probably...

That should enable Bing search.

https://github.com/microsoft/edit A new console mode editor from Microsoft? Written in Rust, and available (apparently) for MacOs and Linux as well as Windows. Although the release is version 1.0, it seems to need plenty more work. If you want a 64 bit console mode editor for Windows, Yedit...

Michael Niehaus has an interesting blog post on the WindowsApps folder and how it is cleared up. WindowsApps folder getting out of hand?

The article cited by ghacks says: Which you can do if c:\inetpub doesn't exist. If it does this won't work. Although the underlying API does allow any user with WRITE_ATTRIBUTES permission to change an existing empty folder, mklink insists on creating a new folder. But if the folder already...

Which says this is an "Elevation of Privilege" issue. An ordinary user can make a change to something which will make a separate process running with higher privileges perform an action using those privileges which can then be exploited. In this case: "Improper link resolution before file...

That message shows there's a NoOpenWith dntry for notepad.exe https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/restore-old-classic-notepad-windows/ Shows how to fix this.

That's fair. The reason for adding the Application Compatibility shim is that the F1 help works correctly for each program that you've shimmed. Which is more work. (Also I've never been able to successfully make a Compatability Mode using Win 10 or 11 which would make it simple to apply to...

It's also possible to extract the required files from the last version available from Microsoft, place them in separate folder, e.g. "Program Files (x86)/winhelp", write a small shim with the application compatibility toolkit to redirect calls to winhelp.exe and apply it.

Older 32 bit applications will normally run virtualised, which should silently fix that problem. Alternatively, you could ease the permissions. Better would be to use the Application Compatibility Toolkit to fix whatever issues arose. Luabuglight is a really good tool for finding the problems...

I remember Mark Russinovich gave a talk about UAC. He said something to the effect that the point of UAC was to remind developers to write software that worked for unprivileged users. In XP days fixing software so that it worked for non-admins was a regular task.

A good explanation of the security advantages of being a normal user. I've used separate accounts since XP days. When managing computers for others, I wanted to have the same user experience as they did. So I knew things worked. For some years we had fewer home PCs than users, and I'd never...

You can choose to apply user policies to specific users on your PC. see @Brink tutorial Apply Local Group Policy to Specific User in Windows 10 . But if you don't make those preparations, any user policy you set will apply to all current and future users. If you're administering a domain, you...

Does your enterprise environment require you to allow users to run any executable they can find or download or create? (One I worked in did.) So you need to trust your users to be vigilant and sensible. One thing you could do is to force the extension to show for .exe and any other 'dangerous'...