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Internet Explorer springs more leaks

plinden

plinden

macrumors 601
Original poster
Apr 8, 2004
4,029
143
www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2135289/internet-explorer-springs-leaks

Interesting that there are now four known, high risk, unpatched vulnerabilities in MSIE and Outlook, and MS have know about two of them for almost two months.

And before anyone says "I run XP and I've never had a problem with spyware or viruses" - I do too, and I haven't had a virus on a PC since about 1990, when someone else used an infected floppy on my PC, and the only "spyware" that adaware or spybot shows up are tracking cookies. But then I'm not a typical user and it's typical users that are fueling the virus/malware epidemic.
 
In other news today, our IT team set a forcefully-worded ultimatum around to everyone ordering all installs of Firefox to be removed. No exceptions.

But their dominion does not extend to our Macs... :)

Our web guys are not impressed.
 
We're not allowed Firefox either - only IE and crippled so that plug-ins (Flash and Real don't work with it). Makes it tough when the competitor that you're analysing has a Flash-based website (although good for us if mutual target customers can't use it easily quickly!)

The good news is that when I have lots of research to do, I get to stay home and do it on the Mac... ;)
 
Blue Velvet said:
In other news today, our IT team set a forcefully-worded ultimatum around to everyone ordering all installs of Firefox to be removed. No exceptions.

But their dominion does not extend to our Macs... :)

Our web guys are not impressed.
Click to expand...

Why do your IT guys want rid of Firefox? Is it because there have been a couple of security flaws spotted, which have now been patched?

Do they refuse to support Macs, btw?
 
dops7107 said:
Why do your IT guys want rid of Firefox? Is it because there have been a couple of security flaws spotted, which have now been patched?

Do they refuse to support Macs, btw?
Click to expand...


Corporate package/suite, won't support FF, blah blah blah...

Support Macs? No.
That's my unspoken job, up to a point, in between designing stuff.

We have a maintanence contract if things go seriously wrong... (which they haven't in almost a year of OS X, funnily enough)
 
Blue Velvet said:
Corporate package/suite, won't support FF, blah blah blah...

Support Macs? No.
That's my unspoken job, up to a point, in between designing stuff.
Click to expand...

Kind of similar in my place (university) - except you're best off doing all the support yourself! Our lab is all mac but pretty much the only one, so our IT support tend to blame any troubles we have on them being macs... but how often do we ask them to fix owt? Never.

I still can't believe I bought a Mac - 6 months ago I was cursing the things :eek:
 
Blue Velvet said:
Corporate package/suite, won't support FF, blah blah blah...

Support Macs? No.
That's my unspoken job, up to a point, in between designing stuff.

We have a maintanence contract if things go seriously wrong... (which they haven't in almost a year of OS X, funnily enough)
Click to expand...
Weird that. In that case our IT seems to be pretty good for a Windows-only department. Although all company-provided computers are PCs running Windows XP (except for the Solaris, AIX and Linux development machines, but they don't support them except for hardware. We keep track of all OS patches and installed software ourselves. I do get the impression that IT would get rid of them if they weren't needed to develop our software) they don't actually force us to use any particular combination of software.

They'll only fix problems with IE, Outlook, WinXP OS issues etc, but we can install whatever else we want, or use Macs if we want. However, if we install an unsupported program, they won't try to fix any problem it may cause - if the PC is screwed up, they'll reformat the HD and reset it to the base configuration.

I guess IT feels they can't really enforce usage rules since most of the software development staff has as much, if not more, experience in running and maintaining computers than they do.
 
plinden said:
Weird that.
Click to expand...

Not really. There's only 3 of them and about 100 of us 'users' messing with their Dells, every one of them checking their webmail, hanging around on eBay, playing solitaire etc.

Being a designer, my PC is only there for email and MR. :)
 
Blue Velvet said:
Not really. There's only 3 of them and about 100 of us 'users' messing with their Dells, every one of them checking their webmail, hanging around on eBay, playing solitaire etc.

Being a designer, my PC is only there for email and MR. :)
Click to expand...
Hmm - 16 IT for 521 employees here. I guess they have it easy since any of the software dev staff would rather die than admit to needing IT's help for anything short of total hardware failure.
 
plinden said:
And before anyone says "I run XP and I've never had a problem with spyware or viruses" - I do too, and I haven't had a virus on a PC since about 1990, when someone else used an infected floppy on my PC, and the only "spyware" that adaware or spybot shows up are tracking cookies. But then I'm not a typical user and it's typical users that are fueling the virus/malware epidemic.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, do you mean that you're able to avoid adware/spyware without some kind of adaware/spybot tool, when using XP and MSIE? That's impressive! If you ran XP and all you did was get rid of MSIE for Firefox, I'd believe that you'd pretty much be golden. But it seems to me like you have to turn off a lot of important features to get IE to the point where it would be safe, based on the way its security features work....
 
mkrishnan said:
Just out of curiosity, do you mean that you're able to avoid adware/spyware without some kind of adaware/spybot tool, when using XP and MSIE? That's impressive! If you ran XP and all you did was get rid of MSIE for Firefox, I'd believe that you'd pretty much be golden. But it seems to me like you have to turn off a lot of important features to get IE to the point where it would be safe, based on the way its security features work....
Click to expand...
Ah, no. I've been using Firefox and before that Mozilla since the turn of the century. But I have been using PCs since the IBM XT (missed out on the AT) was state of the art, and since the dawn of the internet I used MSIE (which is only since about 1994, now that I think about it). Now I use it only for Windows update.

I just didn't visit any dubious sites. I guess, even in my misspent youth, porn paled in comparison to reality.
 
At my workplace, a lot of sites are blocked.... a lot, including macrumors. I'm actually going to put a cgi-proxy on my webserver so I can view macrumors.... someday.

That said, I work in a department with a lot of people that spam all types of crap mail. Anyway, it seems that everything can go through our email system.
 
plinden said:
Ah, no. I've been using Firefox and before that Mozilla since the turn of the century. But I have been using PCs since the IBM XT (missed out on the AT) was state of the art, and since the dawn of the internet I used MSIE (which is only since about 1994, now that I think about it). Now I use it only for Windows update.

I just didn't visit any dubious sites. I guess, even in my misspent youth, porn paled in comparison to reality.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the last bit is probably good advice. ;) Although it seems like there are some semi-reputable sites with disreputable practices.... :(

I've been using Windows since the late days of 3.1 -- 1993 I think -- before that I was Commodore / Amiga and before that Radio Shack Color Computer. :)

But my position on IE is yours now too -- I just use it for updates. And that in itself almost completely eliminates the issues on a Win PC. :)
 
Blue Velvet said:
Corporate package/suite, won't support FF, blah blah blah...

Support Macs? No.
That's my unspoken job, up to a point, in between designing stuff.

We have a maintenance contract if things go seriously wrong... (which they haven't in almost a year of OS X, funnily enough)
Click to expand...

It doesn't seem correct that the IT people treat you that way Blue Velvet. It's a good thing that a Mac is so reliable. With an experienced user as your self it even means less of a need. ;)
 
dops7107 said:
Kind of similar in my place (university) - except you're best off doing all the support yourself! Our lab is all mac but pretty much the only one, so our IT support tend to blame any troubles we have on them being macs... but how often do we ask them to fix owt? Never.

I still can't believe I bought a Mac - 6 months ago I was cursing the things :eek:
Click to expand...

*LOL* Its almost like a reality show... First you cant stand it, Then you grow attached to it..
 
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