Dept. of Homeland Security Says to Stop Using IE

LWATCDR writes "I have been saying this for a long time but now it is offical. From Yahoo News: 'The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.'" In related news, rocketjam writes "According to Wired, the widespread Internet Explorer security exploit last week and CERT's subsequent recommendation that IE users should consider switching to another browser has resulted in a large spike in downloads of the Mozilla Organization's Mozilla and Firefox web browsers."

Comments

Let's turn this around, shall we

[broothal]

People in this thread keeps saying that M$ is under pressure and this is the best news since sliced bread. Well, I see this a wee bit different. Now, Mozilla is under pressure!

Once Mozilla gains sufficiently market shares, we will see exploits for that browser more and more often. And yes - there will be exploits. IE is not compromised so often just because it's poorly written, but because it's so popular that hordes of script kiddies are trying out every possible hack.

This is OLD NEWS

[Anonymous Writer]

CERT gave the warning on July 10. BBC reported this on June 14. I tried to submit 5 different revisions of this story on June 16. I thought it was important to get the word out because I would like to have known about this if I was running windows (I did on my old laptop).

Old News for Nerds. Stuff that mattered.

Re:If it's broke...well....we'll fix it later

[Ender Ryan]

No. That is totally inaccurate. This is a question of negligence, specifically, extreme, actionable negligence. Many companies have been successfully sued for extreme negligence. I believe there are legal definitions that define what constitutes extreme negligence.

Sometimes juries allow negligence laws to be abused, eg. the McDonald's coffee fiasco*, but that a slippery slope does not make.

* Yes, I have read about the whole case. No, just because the coffee was extremely hot does not make McDonald's liable. Good coffee _should_ be extremely fucking hot. The only negligence going on there was an old woman squeezing a styrofoam cup between her legs, a woman too old to jump up immediately to mitigate the damage. The case was won because the jury sympathized with the old woman and because McDonald's handled the case very callously. IMO, McDonald's deserved it, but it still constitutes an abuse of the law.