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Penn State Tells Students To Ditch IE
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."
Will this ITS department support issues with other browsers. Each browser has its quirks, and work arounds for certain things. If they recommend using other browsers, they must be able to support them, especially if they run proxies.
Kudos to Penn State for not falling into the "it's built into the OS so we'll use it as a standard!" trap.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
But make sure that your alternate browser it is a recent version of Firefox or Mozilla. They have responded very quickly to security issues, and are being proactive about security, much more so than the the people behind Konqueror or Opera. Also, keep your alternate browser patched just as vigilantly as you would Internet Explorer. As the popularity increases you will see more attacks against Mozilla based browsers.
I don't know what the answer to security is. I hope it isn't educating users, because that just plain doesn't work for most people. The problem is that right now there doesn't seem to be any other way.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.
At this point, Microsoft needs to pay for market share and mindshare. IE can't compete at its current price (free/bundled), so they'll lower it.
You are dealing with a Windows admin. For many of them, the common reason for everything is that the problem is someone else's fault. That someone else being a combination of Microsoft, Firefox, Winamp, the computer's mood that day, some virus, "an act of God," or hackers that don't really exist. Don't take it personally.
Open Source Sushi
IT staff doing their job will both recommend the safest path as well as try to prevent damage. It's wonderful that the university took such steps, but to say that IE isn't the problem is very, very incorrect.
I see PCs all the time which have IE up to date as well as have up to date anti-virus software that are *still* plagued with problems. Why? IE vulnerabilities.
Even for a patched system, IE presents a vulnerability for computers that are used for "general" web surfing. Firefox is a perfectly valid recommendation, even for those with up-to-date systems.
Sometimes, thanks to clueless professors, I've needed to use IE. I actually talked to two professors about using standards instead of cheap development tools that foist garbage on their students and would require expensive software and break in a year or two. It was like talking to a brick wall and they could care less. I was polite, and I can only hope that they remember me and think, "hmmm, that guy was right."
Having a University policy in place would be great. The line, "Use a standard browser" would no longer work. More importantly, stuff that does not work with Mozilla or Konqueror would get fixed and that would spare me a few trips to the library.
A policy like that would also be nice for the staff. Morons who think Microsoft is some kind of standard would get the message loud and clear. More importantly, this removes any kind of lingering FUD about the University not "supporting" alternate browsers. I'm sure the IT staff would love it too because they are the ones who get to spend the all nighters and who bear the embarrassment of turning off whole dorms and sections of campus when the next M$ born worm crawls through.
This kind of transition has been happening at my University but slowly. The student log in still has an advertisement for Microsoft software on the first page but all the public kiosks in the Union have been converted to Linux terminals running Mozilla. The continuing security dissaster is finally getting solved with something other than the blame the user game.
It's nice to hear some good news coming from Penn State.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If this is their public face, it most likely means that the place is run by total dicks. You're better off switching to a different school.
Penn State's IT department is definitely NOT inept. I was there from 1999-2003 and I was always impressed with their implementations, policies, security, and interest in encouraging new technologies. Hell, all Computer Science grad students are given Apple Powerbooks with VirtualPC and Windows. Penn State was one of the first to give their students free Napster service in order to circumvent the RIAA bullshit. Even as a Mechanical Engineering student, I had access to Windows, Macs, Suns, and Linux boxes. I had FTP-able storage that I could access from Lab computers and from my apartment. They may not be the best, but from comparisons I've made between them and other Tier 1 schools that I've visited or attended, they are above average.
[insert lame joke here]
When I was in school, I remember using Netscape 3 to view webpages (after all, we were using Unix).
I'd rather say that universities are going back to their roots. IE was designed for home computers and the Joe User, not for universities.