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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."

4 of 486 comments (clear)

  1. WinAmp and the MBR by kingkade · · Score: 0, Troll

    When you install winamp an option to install a component into the machine's MBR may have been chosen in the default full install. This enables a WinAmp [Boot] Agent to load itself before calling the ntldr, thus allowing the machine to be configured to play a MIDI, AU or MP3 stream at the splash while the machine boots. Also, there was a security advisory for WinAmp 5.03, if that has anything to do with it.

    Cheers, HTH

    --
    why run from Vincenzo?
    1. Re:WinAmp and the MBR by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 0, Troll
      Actually, I have had crashes that I was able to relate to Winamp before.

      One of the things Winamp does/did is bind to the CD autoplay feature.

      In practice that means if I insert some software-only CD Roms into the drive, and installed some pieces of software from it, several minutes through the install -boom! The hard-locked/dead OS wasn't really very communicative about exactly what had gone on. It didn't effect every install, but some software became completely uninstallable.

      Either way, on two different machines, uninstall Winamp, and the problem went away. Reinstall- the problem came back. Gack!

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  2. Feel sorry for the IT departments by eneville · · Score: 0, Troll

    Students are going to be asking: 1) Duh does my intarweb still work? 2) Wheres my popups gone? 3) Why doesn't the flash movies work? 4) What are these tab thingys? 5) Whats a book mark?

    --
    Why UNIX?
  3. Re:About time by hutchy · · Score: 0, Troll

    I think your pretty arrogant, and you wasted 6 years of your time. I would put you in the category of DOLT.