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New IE Holes Discovered

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the yes-even-more dept.

joelt49 writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that 7 new security holes for Internet Explorer have been discovered by a Chinese researcher; however, there apparantly aren't any attacks on IE yet." The part about this story that gets to me is that the researcher didn't alert Microsoft before posting to a public mailing list. Sure, a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but that's no reason to make it worse for the millions of people who are forced to use Microsoft products, especially for security holes which have yet to be exploited.

2 of 801 comments (clear)

  1. New Rival to Internet Explorer... by xirtam_work · · Score: 5, Funny
    Microsoft are about to announce a replacement for Internet Explorer called 'MS String Vest'.

    A spokesman was quoted as saying, "It's the only way we can release a product with more holes than IE".

    It is unconfirmed if StringVest will be integrated into Windows XP SP2 or if we will have to wait until LongHorn is released.

  2. Truly innovative thinking at Microsoft by YouHaveSnail · · Score: 5, Funny

    Programmer 1: "Hey, guys, we've really got to do something about the security problems we've been having with IE lately. Any ideas?"

    Programmer 2: "I've got an idea! My CS prof used to joke that you could solve any problem by adding one more layer of abstraction. In this case, it's true. Imagine how totally cool it would be if IE was just a regular application. Right now we've got it tangled up in the OS, but if you think about it, there's really no good reason for that. I mean, why does IE need special priviledges just to load files and render some HTML? If we pull it out of the OS, it'll still work fine, and it'll just naturally be subject to all the OS-level protection mechanisms we've got."

    Programmer 1: "What?! You're talking madness, man! Are you saying that we should subject one of our own applications to the same forces we use to prevent third parties from gaining too much market share? Egads, that's brilliant! I'll bet we can even patent that..."

    Programmer 3: "Guys, the idea certainly sounds cool, but it won't work. Bill said it's impossible. Don't you remember that Netscape trial thing? I know we're not supposed to ever talk about it, but he said it was impossible during his taped deposition. If Bill says it's impossible..."

    Programmer 2: "...then it must be impossible. You're right."

    Porgrammer 1: "Damn, you're right. Seemed like such a good idea."