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Listen to the Governor

If you’ve been listening to me carp for a while, you’ll find everything in this post to be old news.

In the wake of last week’s astounding nastiness, there are now at least two organizations, including the Department of “Homeland” Security (I don’t like that word, sorry) recommending that computer users use “anything but Internet Explorer” for web browsing.

DHS (CERT): “It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser.”

SANS: “Use a browser other then MSIE until the current vulnerabilities in MSIE are patched.”

DHS, folks. The people who are supposed to be preparing us for the possibility of terrorist attack. This is comparable to your dentist telling you to floss or your teeth will fall out. Governor Ridge is telling you to use a different browser or the Russian Mafia will load up your system with malware. Point this out to your corporate IT folks when they give you grief for downloading and installing Firefox.

Microsoft is hedging, apparently. Asa pointed out Scoble’s post on the topic, which was essentially a petulant, “Well, the other browsers aren’t 100% secure, either.” No, they’re not. But isn’t 95% secure better than 50% secure? Come on. The internet is a rough neighborhood.

Now, everyone tired of me beating this dead horse, raise your hands. Oh, hey, I don’t see anyone with their hands raised!

Now playing: Higher In Time from Too Close To Heaven • The Unreleased Fisherman’s Blues Sessions by The Waterboys

Posted by pjm on July 2, 2004 1:27 PM |

Comments

Ok ok, but look, when one is busy with one’s job (hopefully aided by technology) and when the new version of Mozilla that you just downloaded imports all of your bookmarks, which you depend on to do your job quickly and efficiently and then presents them to you in a totally new order, it is totally useless. Not to mention that I have re-register for every freakin registration requiring website. So, give us users a break. It’s going to take me at least 3 hours of work before I’m going to be fully up and running on my new browswer, and that’s three hours that my job is not currently allowing me.

Posted by: Rabs | July 2, 2004 2:24 PM

Out-of-order bookmarks are annoying, and having to remember one’s login information for every website one is registered to is annoying. So you take a few minutes here and there, in your spare time, to put your bookmarks in the order you like. When you want to use one of your registration-required web sites, type and save your username and password pair then. If I knew I was sitting on a big fat security hole and memory sucker, let’s just call it “IE”, I’d much rather deal with a little discomfort until I had time to get my environment “just so”, than deal with the potential problems that using IE causes. Besides, if you don’t have the time to set up your environment, maybe you shouldn’t web surf so much. :)

Posted by: JM | July 2, 2004 6:31 PM

It’s preventive maintainence.

Sure, it can be a hassle now, but it’s an order of magnitude easier than cleaning up from a crapware infestation, especially of the Russian Spam Mafia variety. Many of those compromises have cleanup instructions which begin with “First, perform a low-level format of your system drive…”

Posted by: pjm | July 5, 2004 8:02 PM

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