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German Government Advises Public To Stop Using IE
An anonymous reader writes "After McAfee's disclosure of an IE 0-day vulnerability this week that had been used in Operation Aurora, the hack and stealing of data from Google, Adobe and about 3 dozen other major companies, the German government has advised the public to switch to alternative browsers (untranslated statement). Given that the exploit has now been made public and the patch from Microsoft is still nowhere to be seen, how long will it be before other governments follow suit?"
It is not a question of living in a glass house. No application is 100% secure. At issue with Microsoft products; your ass is hanging in the wind for at least 30 days from a security vulnerability... unless they deem it serious enough to issue one outside their update window. At least with Firefox and the other Mozilla based browsers, your ass is hanging out there much less, and that is the real issue when dealing with security issues.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Perhaps they did - and then MS said "we'd listen to you, but we gave loads of money to a lobbyist organisation who then gave it to the senator on your oversight committee, so bog off".
Considering that certain other browsers (Firefox and Safari) experience many more security bugs these days
What a bunch of crap!
Where's your proof?
#1) It's impossible to conclusively make this statement since we don't have access to Microsoft's internal bug tracker.
#2) The directly comparable indicators we do have (how many major exploits are actually published) do not agree with your statement. #3) Your statement ignores one other key factor: The time it takes the vendor to fix the bug. Who cares is a browser has only one major security exploit per year if it takes two years for the vendor to fix it? At that point, your ass is always hanging out in the wind.
Life is too short to proofread.
a) Almost everybody has PDF reader installed (it's preinstalled on most PCs)
b) Firefox managed to contain it.
c) We all know IE is way more promiscuous than other browsers.
No sig today...