Posted on 04/28/2014 7:13:12 AM PDT by JoeProBono
Hackers are already at work exploiting a newly discovered flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that has left more than half of the world’s Web browsers vulnerable to attack, including those on many federal government computers. Microsoft said it was aware of “limited target attacks” in a security advisory posted on Saturday. The flaw affects Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11. However, hackers are mostly targeting versions 9 through 11, according to the security firm FireEye, which discovered the flaw.........
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The flaw affects Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11.
I’m not talking about the flaw; the article is about removing IE so the flaw won’t affect it. Unfortunately, at least one part of the article still applies:
MS uses IE to update operating systems.
Thank you!!!!!!
I don’t use it either except when something cannot be seen in FireFox from a company I used to work for.
Well, I would suggest-
Don’t Use IE as your browser.
Use something like Firefox and at least it will provide some protection, even though it uses IE as it’s base. Various addons for Firefox like NOSCRIPT help provide another layer of protection.
There is only so much you can do. Even if we had a cure (a fix), there is always a new disease.
Yes, FF operates differently when you use a different operating system.
Just like the earlier poster who said he had a MAC (where we assume he meant an APPLE computer), your environments are different, ergo you get different results.
Let me ask you this, when you downloaded Firefox, did you download the version for Windows or the one for Linux ?
Yes, there are browsers that use the IE rendering engine rather than roll their own. Firefox actually has a plugin you can to allow this as well (though I don't really know why you would.) Other browsers, like Opera and Firefox are completely separate programs that do not use the IE engine at all by default.
Personally, I think we'd all be better off if everyone just completely abandoned all microsoft products entirely, but what you said is untrue. Yes, it's difficult, if not impossible to actually remove IE from a windows system. That is by design, as microsoft makes extensive use of proprietary crap to destroy its competition by leveraging vendor lock-in as much as they can get away with. However, what you stated is simply not true.
Enhanced Protected Mode is a security feature that was introduced in Windows 8. By default, this feature is turned off in Internet Explorer on the Windows 8.1 desktop.
When this feature is enabled, add-ons such as toolbars, browser helper objects (BHOs), and extensions are loaded only if they are compatible with Enhanced Protected Mode. If you have to load an incompatible add-on, you can disable Enhanced Protected Mode for the desktop browser. This action lets incompatible add-ons load, but it may increase the risk of having malware or other potentially harmful software installed on your computer.So I would say depending on the add-on or extension you are using, it might. :-(
Of course the windows version.
It’s simply a port to that platform. Do you understand what progammers mean when they say “port” to a platform ?
You can download the source code for the Windows version and the source code for the Linux version and compare them.
I downloaded the Linux source; it’s tons of C++; I highly doubt, from just a quick glance, that it makes use of much besides display primitives, network and file i/o, user interaction, other OS primitives like threads, etc.
The latest “esr” (extended support) release is here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/24.5.0esr/
You will notice a directory for each platform:
linux686 (32bit)
linux86_64 (64bit)
mac
win32
and you’ll notice a directory
source
under which there is a unified source archive; there’s just one set of programs. This leads me to guess that they’ve used the standard approach of not relying too heavily on platform specifics of any one platform that are high-level and would entail a lot of work to recreate on the other platforms.
IMHO, again, I haven’t looked at it, but if you’d like to prove that they “use” Internet Explorer, you certainly could look in the source code and find where they do.
Hmm, I didn’t know that.
IMHO, sw today is junky by design; too complex, too wide open in terms of security. Insecure by design. Even networking - what a bad joke of security.
The 400 showed that things can be secure and solid.
But now we see that security seems to be the last thing those “in charge” want.
When they started putting web stuff in the newly renamed “iSeries”, oh boy, what a joke.
Like building a model t on top of a maybach.
Security could be designed into the internet to be its default state, but our political masters enjoy being able to read your email too much. Why it that no major email client uses PGP by default to encrypt your email? Drives be crazy, as a long term paranoid old-timer who used to use PGP a lot from a DOS command line.
Yes, you'd be able to see the calls.
IE and Firefox use completely different rendering engines, among other things. You can easily demonstrate that by going to the Acid Test website in IE and Firefox, Opera and Chrome. You'll notice you get completely different results each time.
Thanks for the response. I respect your apparent knowledge of this issue, but still disagree with you. I understand your arguments, but am still unconvinced. If I am wrong, good. Then I’ll learn something new. I want to find out if my assertion is true or not. It may be that we are saying the same thing, but don’t realize it yet.
What browser did you use to download Firefox ?
I.E. What browser does Linux come equipped with ?
If you are using an APPLE computer, one would logically conclude that this 'problem' doesn't pertain to you.
Thanks, JoeProBono.
PieterCasparzen, read the info at the link in post #10, and see if it isn’t saying exactly what I said.
P.S. Get on a Windows based PC, start up FIREFOX, then to to the TASK MANAGER. Tell me then that Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) is not running.
Linux surely has it’s own version of iexplore.exe that is running as well. I just don’t know the name of it.
OK, what kind of 'computer' do you have and what operating system ?
So... it might depend on which 'version' of WINDOWS you are using, correct ?
What version are you using ?
I run Linux on it. Windows has been completely removed from the system. I booted it up once to Windows to be sure the hardware was working, then re-partitioned the entire disk(s).
I've run Fedora on it ever since.
Did as you said.
iexplore.exe is NOT RUNNING.
I’m running CentOS, (Community Enterprise OS).
It is a community version of Red Hat Linux. The Red Hat distribution is aimed at a corporate customer user base. Red Hat customers pay Red Hat for support of Linux.
The CentOS team is an organization unto itself, though it has ties with Red Hat (recent changes brought them closer). They call Red Hat the “upstream vendor”. CentOS basically takes Red Hat’s distribution, source code and all, and removes the Ret Hat branding and substitute CentOS branding, and builds their distribution from that. The CentOS distribution is available free of charge - but the caveat is there’s no support available to purchase. The CentOS customer must get by on their own.
Red Hat/CentOS comes with Mozilla Firefox as its default browser.
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