Miserably
December 18, 2008Sometimes, the blatant obviousness of shameless bias and lust for sensationalism in the tech media becomes so glaringly obvious, it’s almost enough to make me want to just quit this whole thing. We of course already have Windows Vista and Windows 7, where the media are too scared to say anything that does might create a state of cognitive dissonance within its readers, but the latest round of patches for various browsers really bring this to the fore front.
The whole world is all over Internet Explorer 7 for having a flaw which might lead to malicious code execution. Users who are using Windows properly and are running as limited users are less likely to be affected. Headlines o’plenty, the world is going to end, Gates eats babies, and child porn will be installed on your computer, and you will be arrested and thrown into a Thai jail cell for the rest of your life. You’ll die lonely and miserably.
In the meantime, both Opera and Firefox 2.x and 3.x suffered from not one (like IE), but several critical and severe security flaws, flaws that could also lead to the execution of malicious code without the user’s consent. These announcements didn’t receive the sensationalist headlines, didn’t get the doom and gloom news postings.
Look, IE is still a piece of shit, but so are Firefox and Opera (I prefer Chrome), but the obviousness of all this sensationalism is just seriously discouraging.
Chrome? Isn’t weird that this media “message” came in the time when Google removed the beta status from Chrome? I think somebody (name starting with G and ending with oogle) is making sure this IE flaw is overrated.
Comment by Budd — December 18, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
I personally won’t move to Chrome unless NoScript is ported. It would be digital suicide to use Chrome without Noscript’s protection.
Comment by Eugenia — December 18, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
User account is not enough. You have to disable user autostarts also.( those can be well hidden )
In the real world alternative software to the MS mainstream is soo much more secure. Hackers and Crackers know what most people use and will target that.
Comment by Tom — December 18, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
The main reason that this flaw became so famous was that over 10,000 websites were already exploiting this flaw. Flaws are found in everything all the time but it is rare to find one that has been so widely exploited.
Also, don’t be so sure about Chrome - critical flaws will be found in it too, just like everything else.
Comment by Sultan Q. Khan — December 25, 2008 @ 12:46 am