A newly found flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could have devastating effects.
This new flaw makes every link on the Internet a potential source of infection for unsuspecting Winblows users. While I'm always happy to see aspects of Microsoft's inferiority revealed, I'm not looking forward to the impact this new flaw may have.
Depending on how wary a user is of downloads of common filetypes (such as .pdf or .doc) might be, this new flaw could allow a malicious programmer to seed any number of computers with a program that does anything he wants. This is an entirely new breed of vulnerability.
Traditionally, computer users could rely on "smarts" to prevent trouble. Users have been trained not to open unexpected or otherwise suspicious email attachments. But now all a user has to do is click on a link. If a user clicks on a "known" file type (.pdf, .doc, .xls), this new flaw would allow a perp to sneak itself on to the users drive as a known file type but then actually execute anything the miscreant author desires.
This is bad. This is not good. This could very well be a boon for Linux and other real OSs that are smarter than to fall for this type of thing.
I don't want to see unsuspecting users falling victim, but then, the sooner we can evolve to an OS other than MS Win!DOH!s, the better off our world will be.
Harry Slaughter