Huge security hole in Internet Explorer for MacOS

Brad Lucier writes "Macintouch is reporting (go down the page a bit) that Internet Explorer 5.1, which comes preinstalled on MacOS X 10.1, has a huge security hole---when it downloads arbitrary programs encoded in the Macintosh's standard BinHex (.hqx) format, it automatically executes them. " Well I guess thats one way to make Unix insecure. Can anyone actually confirm this since it looks kinda sketchy. I wonder what someone's rationale would be for that:"Oh this won't hurt anyone, and saving that extra 'OK' click will be great!".

Comments

Sigh.

[DarkZero]

And of course, the media will portray this as "a problem with computers in general" (often used), "a fundamental problem in the structure of the internet" (Code Red), etc. And Microsoft will portray it as "Just one of those unavoidable things that happens when you used a Unix-based operating system".

Fuckin' morons.

Knowing Microsoft...

[neema]

"Oh this won't hurt anyone, and saving that extra 'OK' click will be great!". "

Knowing Microsoft, even when it does ask you to execute the file, the only option it'll give is "OK".

Re:Security comparison; reason for insecure code?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

>Microsoft developers (in the words of Ballmer) are only human as well -- and I'm sure they work just as hard as we do.

Harder! Because evil never sleeps... ;-)

Solution

[KFury]

1. Create script to toggle 'autoexec .hqx downloads' to FALSE
   
2. Insert the file into the X-10 popup banner

Problem solved.

Step back and smell the irony

[1stmammaltowearpants]

We're talking about a Microsoft product running in Unix that came pre-installed with the Mac OS.

These are strange times, my friends.