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Penn State Tells Students To Ditch IE

Posted by timothy on from the and-while-you're-at-it-mull-over-your-OS dept.

Hoyceman writes "About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert 'because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities.' InformationWeek is carrying the story."

2 of 486 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Now the question is... by bone_idol · · Score: 5, Informative
    Firefox supports NTLM authentication on windows also, so you can transparently authenticate. In the location bar type
    about:config
    and look for
    network.automatic-ntlm-auth.allow-proxies
    network .automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
    see http://adam.theficus.com/archives/2004/09/firefox_ tutoria.html
  2. Article Misleading by dampjam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Although Penn State has issued this warning, it is far from true. All Penn State Computer Lab Machines have IE set as the default, and group policy is set such that you cannot switch even to the installed version of Firefox. In addition the Firefox user settings are stored in Application Data which has a 20 meg quota. This means whenever a user tries to log out after browsing, it refuses saying there is too much data. IE on the otherhand, gets cleaned of cookies and cache automatically so that when you log out there is never a problem with the quotas. If Penn State wants to actually get people to switch, they should do something about it on their own machines.