Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE 142
An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."
Just a thought. (Score:2, Interesting)
And honestly, so far the chinese have struck me as the competent types.
What if IE could be uninstalled? (Score:4, Interesting)
Removing IE would save me bandwidth on all the patches and more importantly spare me the forced reboots.
I'd probably find that a lot of rendered local text would stop working without IE such as help pages, but I usually find google more effective than built in help these days any way.
Re:Just a thought. (Score:4, Interesting)
And honestly, so far the chinese have struck me as the competent types.
The several thousand failed attack attempts in my logs would care to disagree.
Re:Why not just disable it instead. (Score:2, Interesting)
Then remove the entries from the start menu and take all the icons off the desktop. Of course this is not practical with XP but will work just fine with vista and 7 as the updates are independent of the default browser. It will work if you control the updates in XP and only enable IE when a critical update happens.
Re:What if IE could be uninstalled? (Score:3, Interesting)
Troll? I know the parent missed the point of the GP that the operating system should not depend on an html rendering engine of a buggy browser, but is quite far from a troll. He brings up a good point. There are a lot of apps that for right or wrong use the IE rendering engine, including plenty of in house applications.
As far as removing IE goes, iexplorer.exe will get rid of the gui leaving just the engine behind it. However, removing an html rendering engine should not break an operating system. Years ago I mistakenly tried to forcibly remove the rest of the engine from windows xp and ended up with more errors and problems than I could figure out. It breaks windows explorer and if I remember correctly causes internet connection problems since connection properties are configured through IE.
Though I would have to call into question how much any modern OS depends on an HTML renderer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both KDE and GNOME would be able to operate with only minor lost functionality without an html rendering engine. I know khelp uses an html library (that oddly is not installed in opensuse by default). GTK+ and QT can both use webkit, but are in no way dependent on it.
It could be worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
You could be one of those people who is stuck using XP SP1, so it won't install to begin with.
Re:Microsot (Score:3, Interesting)
That needs qualifying as #1 in the HOME market. There are many more servers running various brands of Unix and Linux out there than there are running IIS or Apache on a Windows box (though not an insignificant ammount).
Servers are naturally harder to get viruses or trojans onto them as they're generally not used to surf the web, and the only applications executed on them should be done by a responsible sysadmin - who should know better.
Windows is targeted as it is the #1 Home and Business OS, and as most people are clueless about how the technology actually works (running with admin privileges, surfing dodgy sites, falling for phishing scams, opening spam emails). A street magician or scam artist will only target those people who they see as a patsy. The obvious idiot. The lazy fool. Windows and IE attract them both, and they get burned for it.
Re:WTF! FORCED SHUTDOWN (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh! I would love to "upgrade" in-use shared library files so that changes are reflected to loaded instances in every running process! My viruswormtrojan would rule the world!