German Government Advises Public To Stop Using IE 320
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?"
Yeah sure (Score:5, Informative)
It could happen to any browser to have the same security flaw in 3 different versions DESPITE claimed complete rewrites of the code.
MS apologists, you got to admire their dedication. The Iraqi minister of information used windows as well.
Re:To be fair to Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Why be fair to Microsoft in this case? Bashing where bashing is due;
IE is a highly dangerous lump of toxic/radioactive waste, with a half life of over 20 years.
Microsoft did everything wrong. Wrote the piece of shit in the first place. Tightly integrated it into windows, for leveraging purposes. 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.
It's not the "government" (Score:5, Informative)
It's a German federal agency, not the German government. And they warn users about IE every time there is a major unpatched security hole.
Re:Shouldn't they be upgrading before complaining? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/14/cyber_assault_followup/ [theregister.co.uk]
Re:To be fair to Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
"Wrote the piece of shit in the first place"
No, they bought/stole the Microsoft way from Spyglass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc [wikipedia.org].
(the link ends with a dot slashdot moves it after "[wikipedia.org]". bug! )
Re:Right Decision? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A stinging lesson (Score:2, Informative)
Firefox gives you the option of disabling plugins without uninstalling them (as does IE8, those are the only 2 browsers I have installed).
Adobe Reader also gives you the option of not loading pdfs in the browser (the browser simply prompts you to save the file).
Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Informative)
He's probably thinking of articles like this:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/541-mshtml-layout-engine-completely-rewritten-for-internet-explorer-8.html [itwriting.com]
Interesting article here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html [joelonsoftware.com]
"[netscape killed themselves by rewriting]
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".
Not the German Government (Score:4, Informative)
The "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik" (BSI), engl. Federal Bureau for Security in Information Technology, is not a governmental, but a state institution. It is not strictly driven by the government. And it is controlled by the parliament. Even though it works in the domain of the ministry of the interior. So no minister was involved in the "do not use IE" speech.
BTW: IE has not the biggest market share in Germany.
Re:Friends don't let friends.... (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe the summary shouldn't have let out the most important word: temporary. Here a translation of the headlines:
original:
Kritische Sicherheitslücke im Internet Explorer
BSI empfiehlt die vorübergehende Nutzung alternativer Browser
translation:
Critical securiy hole in Internet Explorer
BSI recommends to temporarily use alternative browsers
Re:Firefox doesn't even ship official MSI (Score:2, Informative)
JFGI
http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/ [frontmotion.com]
Re:Not a bit late? It is like a spy platform alrea (Score:3, Informative)
The problem at least as far as PDF readers go, is that most users don't realise PDF is a standard and that there are multiple implementations... They think Adobe make the only pdf reader available.
I would never install acrobat reader, the default pdf readers in macos and linux work much better, far less bloated, and there are plenty of alternatives available for other platforms too.
Re:A stinging lesson (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mozilla is working on an MSI package (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla is working on an MSI package. There's a bug in bugzilla for that. Vote for it and/or help with coding testing.
You're funny.
Bug 52052 [mozilla.org] was opened in 2000.
Bug 231062 [mozilla.org] was opened in 2004 when 52052 was closed with "WONTFIX"
Sure, there's been recent activity, but it's been TEN years. Until MSI becomes a blocker for 3.6 or 3.7, they'll drop it for the new shiny like they've always done.
Re:Before anyone starts throwing stones... (Score:3, Informative)
MS Internet Explorer 8.x: unpatched 4 of 8 Secunia advisories [secunia.com].
MS Internet Explorer 7.x: unpatched 11 of 42 Secunia advisories [secunia.com].
Opera 10.x: unpatched 0 of 3 Secunia advisories [secunia.com].
I can't see your point, are you trolling?