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?"

Comments

Re:Yeah sure

[RightSaidFred99]

Neckbeards, you have to admire their brand of nerd sophistry.

You see, the reason IE has multiple versions is because Microsoft has to maintain backwards compatibility. And no, they are not complete rewrites and nobody has claimed they are. Firefox has the luxury of just telling people "Oh, just update". IE has no such luxury as Microsoft actually sells a product and must support it in a broad range of environments.

You dweebs really do crack me up. Seriously, do you think Firefox doesn't have security flaws? Some guy above was all proud that Firefox "just crashed" on a page while IE did something seemingly nefarious. Of course, some people understand that if your browser crashes on a page there's probably a flaw that can be exploited.

You guys are a hoot, really you are. Keep it up!

Re:Firefox doesn't even ship official MSI

[BitZtream]

The only people who 'must have a MSI' are the idiots who don't actually know how to manage a network. GPO roll outs work fine with other installers as well.

I agree, the attitude here is bad and definitely reinforces that statement.

But in reality, the only people whining about an MSI are people that manage relatively small networks or will be soon since there is no requirement to use an MSI if you've got a third of a clue. And yes, I'm talking about doing it with all the standard MS tools.

Re:To be fair to Microsoft

[BitZtream]

Wrote the piece of shit in the first place.

No, they didn't, the bought it.

Tightly integrated it into windows, for leveraging purposes.

You mean like WebKit in OSX and KDE, or whatever the renderer GNome uses? Don't both of them use that same renderer for the HELP system as well? So basically you're bitching that MS did it, but now everyone does it as well.

Didn't even try to keep on top of updates letting it stagnate. It will have a damaging effect on the web, web standards, and general computing, long after Microsoft drops support for any given version.

So it was OKAY that Netscape/Mozilla fell off the face of the Earth and didn't release a new version for years while they jerked themselves off with rewrite?

You're entire post is either wrong or happened to the other browsers as well.

Its cool how you blame MS and ignore the fact that everyone else does the exact same shit :)

Re:PDF is how they get IE to do it.

[Pieroxy]

One solution: The IE Awareness Initiative !!