Faux's Blog

In Windows Vista, Microsoft added manifests, a way for developers to require that their applications run as administrator, or not at all. This takes control away from the user, me, who I trust, and gives it to some developer (who I might not). While it’s possible to edit the file to remove these manifests, this is hard to do safely and automatically.

I thought it’d be fun to directly fix the problem.

It seems that, like some other things, as far as I can see, there’s no support for this.

Luckily, it’s an even smaller patch than last time. I won’t show it, it’s simply erasure of a jmp. It’s a terrible solution to the problem, and the binary only contains fixes for kernel32.dll as seen on x64 SP1 and x32 SP1 as of now, it could break at any point. I implore nobody to use this utility seriously.

noelev (asc) (cpp) (pdb) works much like the reverse of the unix “sudo” command, running a command via. it makes it run without elevation.

It’s not infectious, so it won’t work for all applications (like some setup applications that unpack other installers), and, of course, some applications actually don’t work without elevation.

A lot of Windows components actually appear to cope relatively gracefully with the unexpected lack of permissions, unlike, say, the nVidia components. I was hoping to find an entertaining failure to screenshot, but they’re all boring.

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I decided on Thursday that I don’t actually use my right-thumb for any keys whilst typing, my left exclusively operates the space-bar, and there are no useful modifier keys on the right-hand side of a Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard.

I decided to add something useful:

If you can’t tell by the head, it’s the remains of an xbox 360 controller:

This, combined with a modified version of mousex gives you an almost usable mouse.

Now I just need to train myself to use it.

As an aside, I used to be worried about damaging the wrist wrests and the other pieces of the body (both of which you can see mutilated above). I am no longer, they’re almost indestructable. I had to switch from a craft knife to a stanley knife to get through the faux-leather on the wrist wrest.

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