• Microsoft outlines Vista desktop search changes
  Microsoft is now releasing details on how they will satisfy the court order to allow their search feature to work with third-party tools. It'll be in SP1, and Microsoft is providing details to help others avoid performance issues as well.
  (tags: SP1 Beta Search Legal )
• Windows Vista Team Blog : Give the Group Policy team your feedback
  If you use Group Policy to manage Vista, give your feedback here!
  (tags: Group Policy GPO )

I received an interesting question by mail the other day regarding my article about MLGO on Windowsecurity.com. The question was, if it is possible to export a local policy assigned to a specific user to a user on another computer…?

After scratching my head and researching a bit it seemed like nobody had a good answer for this and no GUI tool is apparently available - so I had to come up with something myself… This is the result:

The following undocumented - and probably unsupported - method worked for me:

On “Source Computer”:
1. Create/modify a local policy for the “Source User”
2. Go to “C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicyUsers\” and locate the last modified policy folder
- the folder should be named with the SID (Security ID) of the “Source User”, e.g. “S-1-5-21-452792215-1268730067-2626448776-1108″
3. Copy the folder and content to the “Target Computer” into the same directory structure

On “Target Computer”:
1. Rename the newly copied folder to the SID of the “Target User” (the user who should receive the “exported” policy)
- how to find the SID of a local user?
2. Set NTFS permissions on the newly renamed folder to:
- SYSTEM = “Full…

Hey,

I get this question a lot: how can we block U3 devices on the network?

Well, one approach that some companies take is to simply block the physical USB ports by glue etc. - no USB devices are able to get in, so we have a “secure” system… Hmmm, this would mean that we are not able to use other USB devices either - maybe not the best solution for all of us then…

If you have Windows Vista deployed the new Device Control functionality, but most companies have Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 products in production (and probably waits for Vista Service Pack 1 before they go ahead with the Vista deployment)… So, what could they do then?

Third party software, like GFI EndPointSecurity is capable of blocking USB devices etc. - and it’s does a very good job too, but there’s also a free way to do it (if you ask me it’s the best way to do it): implement Software Restriction Policies (SRP)!

I’ve been writing about the “Default Deny All Applications” approach and this is (of couse) also capable of blocking U3 devices - out…