Thomas, you bring up an important point. This behaviour is nothing a
user would expect, and something he usually has links to malicious
software, so how to know that it is ok.

However, as I have mentioned before, I think it is even more dangerous
the other way round. People are trained to trust up pop-up window, and
trust it so much as to enter their password. It seems so easy to me to
exploit this training by putting up a website which opens a pop-up which
looks just like the update-manager, but which installs some malicious
software instead. And since the user is used to pop-up windows asking
for his/her password, he/she will give it right away. And this is a
pitfall which will not only be a danger to newbies and non-geeks, but
basically to everyone who does not use a pop-up blocker for whatever
reason. All these persons will always have to close the pop-up window
and then open update manager manually, in order to confirm that it
really is the right application which they are giving their password to.
IMHO this constitutes a huge security leak, but I haven't seen anybody
else commenting on it, so maybe there is a safeguard that the two of us
don't see?

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[Jaunty] Update Notifier icon would provide useful status information
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/332945
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