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IE Holes Not Microsoft's Fault, Says Bill

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the born-into-a-state-of-sin dept.

thparker writes "As part of the Media Center release discussed previously, Bill Gates had an interview with USA Today. Best quote: 'Q: Speaking of security, Internet Explorer has had well-publicized holes... Gates: Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software.' Well now we know -- these problems have all been our own fault." Any counterexamples?

5 of 1,035 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No thanks by strider44 · · Score: 5, Informative

    *sigh* having more market share is not an excuse. Just look at Apache vs. IIS and you'll see that more market share does not automatically equal more security holes.

  2. Re:No thanks by Atrax · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, Age of Mythology requires admin rights. Good game too.

    This KB article makes a passing mention of this, but doesn't tell you which games require Admin privs.

    Really I think this is just bad design - they could be written to operate normally under non-admin accounts, but ren't. and it's not just games - numerous applications on windows do this for various reasons (registry access/file access etc..)

    --
    Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
  3. Re:No thanks by Mike+Morgan · · Score: 5, Informative

    I thought that that would work too. I set my mom up as a restricted user under Windows 2000. After about 6 months the machine was clogged with spyware and would no longer dial.

    I wrote a program to detect what directories were still writeable as the restricted user, turned out to be quite a few (even including C:\).

    --
    -USR1
  4. Re:No thanks by doob · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'd venture to say most people who use OS X are logged in as admins.

    Even if this is true (but may not be, see below) being an admin under OSX is very different than being an admin under Windows. On Windows, you have rw permissions on everything, whereas under OSX, all it means is that you are in the sudoers file. This means that in order to do anything dangerous, you still need to type in your password again to gain (temporary) root privs.

    Can someone else comment on how the OSX install/add user process prompts you to set up permissions. AFAICR the user is set up as a normal user first, and you then have to explicitly go to the user manager and give them admin permissions. Very different to Windows, where you are prompted to set up an admin user as part of the install process!

    --
    In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
  5. Different Alexa by CharlesDonHall · · Score: 5, Informative
    That's not the Alexa toolbar; it's a Microsoft "feature". If you click on "Tools/Find Related Links" in Internet Explorer, it does a search via the Alexa website. (And brings up a sidebar which gives you the option of downloading the Alexa spyware.)

    So in a sense it's harmless; it's just a built-in web search. But it's generally considered to be spyware because of Alexa's reputation.

    It probably got installed when you did the Internet Explorer update. I think you get it out-of-the-box when you install XP.

    More information here: http://www.imilly.com/alexa.htm