Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Good and Bad File Security From Microsoft

Microsoft seems to have a policy where you can set high security on your computer and block files that came from another computer from running. To unblock you right click on the file and choose unblock and the file can run.

Great. But what about when you download and run a program from the Internet and it has a whole bunch of files required to run and you try to run the app and get cryptic error messages and have no idea what the problem is or which file to unblock even if you do know what the problem is...this is typical Microsoft. When you change settings in your OS it can cripple and even corrupt your OS at times if you change COM and DCOM settings the wrong way.

But even worse I cannot get my work done right now (and had to stop and gripe about it) because this lovely security mechanism has blocked me from uncompressing a zip file. So yeah I turned around and unblocked it - cool, right? Not cool. When I try to unzip it still doesn't work and I am guessing it is because all the files in the zip file came from another computer - and I cannot "unblock" them because they are in a zip file! If that is not the problem not sure what is.

So I like the concept but I don't like the implementation. It would be better to allow someone to see all the files that ran, have run and are running and click on something to see what program they are associated with, which user ran them, time, date, etc. Also it needs to be easy to globally turn on and off this blocking and include those intstructions with the instructions for unblocking a file.