Technosailor.com

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, known as CERT, issued a “vulnerability note” saying that computer users should not use the Internet Explorer browser because of security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to launch attacks on personal computers and corporate networks.

The security lapses can cause a Web site to make the browser think, in effect, that it is running a program that violates its security settings. The Web site can then be used to do anything from recording keystrokes, which make it easier to steal passwords and credit-card numbers, to installing pop-up-ad programs.

Personally, I have been preaching for quite a little while that Internet Explorer is a bad browser for many different reasons. The only thing, I believe, it is good for is not even a feature of IE, but rather a third part addon to the browser – The Google Toolbar, which frankly is the only way of finding the pagerank of a website.

Two years ago, after the Mozilla browser reached the 1.0 milestone, I turned my dad onto it. My father is not what one would call a cutting edge geek like I am. But he was tired of crashing his computer whenever he surfed the internet. He was tired of popups. And on the list goes. Mozilla solved those problems.

Now, I’ve turned him onto the Firefox browser, a browser forked from the Mozilla project.

Truth be told, there are several really great browsers. On Windows, you have Opera as well. On OS X, users don’t have to settle for IE for Mac. They can use Safari. On Linux there isn’t an IE, so there we are safe.

But back to the point of this entry. The problem with Microsoft’s Windows platform, is the integrated nature of everything. It is so simple. In that I agree. It makes the end users computing experience better. This, too, I can agree with. Truth be told, the very integration that causes everything to work seamlessly in Windows is the very thing that causes IE to think it is running a safe process while the process slowly chokes the system.

The computer world is not run by end users. It is run by enterprise systems administrators, network admins and workstation support personnel. To have a vulnerability that carries such catastrophic potential and that runs invisibly is akin to falling asleep in an enclosed room full of carbon monoxide. Slow, silent, quiet and surprising death.

Signing out,
Aaron

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Written by Aaron Brazell on June 30, 2004

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