Finland Issues IE 6 Warning

loconet writes "ZDNet UK reports that The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority have warned computer users against using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 web browser as it has a serious security flaw that compromises computer systems. Microsoft has yet to announce when it will release a patch for the vulnerability, which does not affect XP SP2 users but does affect Windows 2000 users and XP SP1 users. The vulnerability was published at the beginning of November."

Comments

on aftonbladet.se

[fredrikj]

For the record: for several hours this was top news on the front page of aftonbladet.se, the most visited Swedish news site, with the headline "Don't use Internet Explorer". Hopefully at least a few people followed their link to mozilla.org...

Who'd use IE?

[Refrozen]

Again.

That's what? The 1000000th time a 'big' institiution has said to use something other then shiternet exploder?

Few would use MSIE after learning about others

[SgtChaireBourne]

Who'd use IE?

Believe it or not, there are unfortunatley many people that do not hear about secure or functional programs. MS has not only a lock on the desktop market (for the time being), but also the advertising market.

The demand is out there. Whenever I show or tell about the options avaiable, the non-tech people ask afterwards why haven't they received this information earlier.

Perhaps one reason for the decision by the Finnish agencies to advise against MSIE and for Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc. is to compensate for harm done from the computer "security" campaign earlier this year, which amounted to nothing more than a state funded 8-page, 4-color MS ad delivered to every home, apartment or dorm in the country. Telling die hard Chairman Bill fans to update and patch is one thing, but neglecting to even name other options appears to fall somewhere between irresponsible/incompetent and graft.

Maybe this will lead to discussion of other useful tools and operating systems. Obviously, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera are drop in replacements. Likewise, MS-Outlook has a worse track record than MSIE and should be shunned in favor of Eudora, Mozilla, Thunderbird, etc. Home users that just want a computers that works should look at OS X, though I bet there would be a good cottage industry in upgrading old x86 machines to a Linux or BSD distro.

There are also issues like file incompatibility, technological obsolesence, and platform lock-in that those and options like OOo avoid.