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France Tells Its Citizens To Abandon IE, Others Disagree
Freistoss writes "Microsoft still has not released a patch for a major zero-day flaw in IE6 that was used by Chinese hackers to attack Google. After sample code was posted on a website, calls began for Microsoft to release an out-of-cycle patch. Now, France has joined Germany in recommending its citizens abandon IE altogether, rather than waiting for a patch. Microsoft still insists IE8 is the 'most secure browser on the market' and that they believe IE6 is the only browser susceptible to the flaw. However, security researchers warned that could soon change, and recommended considering alternative browsers as well." PCWorld seems to be taking the opposite stance arguing that blaming IE for attacks is a dangerous approach that could cause a false sense of security.
I'm sorry but was there a new instance of anticompetitive behavior from MS? I seem to remember MS getting punished from their BS a few years back. Unless I missed something this new round of foolishness was because Opera was complaining because no one uses their browser.
Guess what I did today at work?
I had to test security products. (since we're deciding to change antivirus vendors) So I got three machines (each with F-secure, Sophos and Vipre), went to my favorite site in the world (malwaredomainlist.com) and downloaded the first link in the list, infecting all 3 PC's with a virus in udner 5 minutes.
Guess which Browser I was using?
(Hint. It wasn't IE)
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They conquered the market by dumping their product and abusing their OS monopoly. They never made the best browser, and Netscape was generally the better option. Only years later, when the OSS community had created a browser which was substantially better than Internet Explorer, did a competitor slowly start to crawl upwards.
Because if you don't ship a browser with the OS most people would never find the Internets. I never understood this from an anti-competitive perspective. If I remember correctly, a significant factor in the MS case was that you couldn't uninstall the browser, which I again, don't really understand. A browser is integral to most computers. If you don't ship the OS with a browser, most users wouldn't be able to get on the net to find a browser. I suppose that not allowing an FTP client on the system would be next? The whole "distributing IE with Windows" is anti-competitive is predicated on the fact that if IE exists on the system most users will be too stupid to make their own choices, which in fact may be true, but I'm not a big fan of protecting people from their own stupidity by making life harder for others. I HATE IE. Do I want Windows to ship without it? No. That would make downloading Firefox that much more difficult. Using this logic cars shouldn't ship with stereos installed because that is anti-competitive vis-a-vis aftermarket manufacturers.
That has nothing to do with what the EU is actually asking MS to do (it isn't going to be another Windows XP N). The EU is going to have Windows come with a "which browser do you want to use?" screen when you first launch "the internet" (i.e. the world wide web (i.e. a browser)).
$ make available
News update: it's 2010. An operating system without a browser is officially ridiculous. Lots of things were true in the 80s that shouldn't be repeated now. We shouldn't be made to jump through hoops just because people are too weak to exercise free (as in speech) will and instead blame it on the company who gave them something because they can't see any difference between not being forced to take a decision, and having that decision taken away. Hating the thing that people aren't choosing not to use doesn't change that.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss"
Do you even know where the word "sabotage" comes from? What an absolutely biggest load of crap ever, ever, EVAAH. Welcome to mankind. You must be new here. People make a fuss because they wanted a slice of the "people want to go online" pie, and by MS releasing a free browser, the only others that have been able to truely compete have had to switch to a F/OSS model... oh no, how terrible!
You know about the phrase 'spanner in the works'? How about the guy who designed a safer way to transfer light bulbs, causing fewer to be broken in transit. People who had made their living out of selling insurance against this were proper up in arms about it.
It doesn't even have to be an actual physical thing. Ideas too. People fight evolution just as people fought taking earth out of the center of the universe. No one cares about what's better or what's right, just what's most convenient... unless that convenience later becomes an inconvenience in which case they complain about the fact that things were made convenient to begin with.
I remember netscrape, without the nostalgia. Even its creators threw it out.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
It didn't get the nickname "nutscrape" just because it sounded alike! And it didn't have its entire codebase thrown out for nothing. But, I had no choice but to use NS to browse with, that was the non-free-(as in "cough up, or tough") browser days, and NS has the monopoly on what ISPs would spend some of your monthly fee on to bundle a browser so you could do something other than look at the "connected" time going up. Then all of a sudden, there was this free alternative that I could choose to use instead.
Funny how history seems so different when you actually remember it.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Standards are a joke. An excuse. A nice idea at best. Pre-IE, websites all just said "best viewed in netscape" on them instead. People need to get over this idea that non-standard defaults to bad. If standards don't do what you want/need them to, then a solution must by definition be non-standard. <frameset>'s, shockingly, weren't the answer to everything. Iframes, being a non-standard microsoft/IE invention solved a lot of problems.
At it's height, I was seeing 98-99% of traffic for customers sites being Internet Explorer. Official (ie, larger sample) figures had it a little under. That makes it pretty damn standard where I'm sitting, you don't get more standard than "everybody". But, the mozilla folks have always been resistant to additions, citing "not the standard" as their get out clause for not being arsed or having code that couldn't support the features. Safari/Chrome prove that that doesn't need to be the way, by striving for "real world compatibility" instead of "not the standard", sites actually work using them, they work quickly, and they work where firefox is now the only one that won't. IE might have a lot to answer for, but it has a lot to be credited for too.
As for the non-windows users argument - when there's enough of us, my clients will be interested in paying to make sure they're catered for. Otherwise, the onus falls on the other side. Be compatible with the other 98% of the world, or be excluded from it. Of course, that 98% has shrunk and fragmented, Chrome 'n Safari are giving compatibility of their chunks towards the rest, and *all* while MS is still bundling a free browser with their OS, because now, the competition is actually competative. Netscrape deserved the death it got, and left us in a much better place to build from.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Name one other browser that even makes an attempt at supporting Group Policy.
Now you know why MS is the number one browser in enterprise today.
If you are naive enough to believe that MSIE stole the game from Netscrape, then I have to hope that you are simply too young to remember Netscrape 4.0. IE crushed the market because 'Netscape' simply SUCKED. IE keeps the enterprise because nobody else has bothered with GP. Change is *hard*. As a sysadmin, any time you can be certain that 90%+ of all settings for an app are the same across your enterprise, you JUMP at the chance.
If you are naive enough to believe that ANY browser is "secure" then you are simply an idiot, and age can be no excuse at all - unless you're 12 or younger, I suppose. If you, personally, are targeted by a remotely skilled script-kiddie, your secrets belong to the world. Unless you PAY ATTENTION, and keep your entire environment up to date, patched, and locked down to the highest degree you can manage. And then you stand a *chance*.
Finally: This has absolutely nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. While we could argue if it is just an idiotic knee-jerk reaction, YOU would come up short, should you search for evidence supporting any argument that relates to monopoly practices. Choice. Exists. Period. Chrome, FF, Opera, Lynx. Three of those are all various degrees of 'better than' the current version of IE. ALL FOUR are various *orders of magnitude* better than IE6 on XP. Which is what this breach is about.
Yeah. IE6. Can't think where I might pick me up something better than THAT.