Time to Dump Internet Explorer
One of my many weaknesses is a fondness for stupid jokes. Here's one that I like:
Why do ducks have webbed feet?
To put out forest fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet?
To put out burning ducks.
Not very sophisticated, I know, but it makes me smile every time I read it. Here's another classic, one that relates directly to many Internet users:
A man goes in to see a doctor. "Doc, whenever I lift my left arm, I get a shooting pain in my shoulder. What should I do?" The doctor replied, "Stop lifting your left arm."
I think many of us are in the position of that man, and today I'd like to act as your physician. Except that I'm not going to talk about left arms and pains in the shoulder; I'm going to talk about a piece of software that causes us pain in a different part of the body - Internet Explorer.
The latest version of IE is 6, and it has certainly accumulated an impressive record of holes: 153 since 18 April 2001, according to the SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities Archive. There have been some real doozies in there. For instance, last August, Microsoft issued a patch that fixed a hole that the company described this way: "It could be possible for an attacker who exploited this vulnerability to run arbitrary code on a user's system. If a user visited an attacker's Web site, it would be possible for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability without any other user action." Oh, is that all? Well, that's super - simply visit a Web page, and you're 0//N3d, d00d!
