Redmond promises emergency IE bug fix on Friday (zero day + 5)

I agree with you yossarianuk - a lot of people realised this decades ago, but we get called all sorts of names for thinking it and then the reasons we state get misconstrued to things like "if we can see the code, it's somehow magically more secure even if it's crap". It's not a question of security, or business, or affordability, or readability, or features, or even neat coding tricks.

The question of who you rely on is a big one in computing and, in my history, Microsoft is not a front-runner. I honestly can't guarantee that my Windows servers will be running tomorrow, even if I don't count hardware failure as a possibility. And I can't even say how long it would take to get a fully-functional replacement up and running either. And it's because of my lack of trust in Microsoft products given my experience with them.

Browsers are probably THE most important application that I allow to traverse my firewalls - they act on untrusted input all day long and have to do so fast, efficient and change constantly to keep up with standards. As such, I haven't used IE since, literally, IE4. It was just that bad. I was on Netscape before most people had ever even heard of the Internet (I remember my CS teacher being flabbergasted that I got an email from someone in Canada because they'd downloaded one of my games, and they read it out in class they were so overawed!) and from the first days, IE was always a heap of junk. It takes a lot more than "making good" those problems I find myself to get me to use it again, after that amount of bad history.

I have a sort-of-plan at the moment to write a video game. I have lots of code running already, and the expertise to make it work, and I don't think it will be anything fabulous or fantastic but, hey, I might sell a few copies in the style of some shareware-type games from back-in-the-day even if it's just as a smartphone app or an indie bundle game or something.

And occasionally I get to dreaming about how I'd scale up if it sold millions. Employ programmers and artists, setting up a compile farm, testing environments, distribution channels, payment processing, server hosting, version control, software patching, etc.

First item on the wishlist would be linux desktops, linux server, linux hosting, linux cross-compliation, linux virtual-machine hosts. The only MS-reliant item I'd have would be a real home PC with Windows on it as a sort of acid-test (because I would not like to think that making something "Windows compatible" would go out to the public without at least one real-world test on the intended OS). I literally would actually go out of my way, if I had enough funds, to avoid anything to do with "that" company even if I was writing games for their platform. I'm not even sure it would cost more or cause a lack of features on my end if I did either. But for sure, the productivity of updates, security and the simple things in life (like having a fecking desktop work how ****I****, the user, want it to) would be worth any hassle I did encounter.

I honestly don't trust MS to make a game that I won't hate to install any more. Just how do people trust it to run their most-critical and attack-vulnerable piece of software? I spend half my time setting up new PC's to turn off lots of the MS junk and install things that I know will do a better job (AV is one, software firewall is another, browser is another).

I don't get people that still use IE. Hell, at absolute maximum, I'd run it with settings that prevented it from accessing anything external whatsoever. A hole sitting in it for a week or so is nothing compared to the nightmares that it's experienced over the years.

On a side-note: My employer has just asked me to block anything IE talking out at the proxy that controls the web filtering (even though it's not accessible in any of our standard disk images). Totally unrelated to this vulnerability, and we've been a Firefox shop for years now, but just one of those things that even non-techies are starting to pick up on. It's just too much of a liability to have around and to trust to work how you expect.

Re: Arghhh

yeah that would work, hackers won't simply focus all their efforts on chrome. we've seen a big rise in non-IE exploits recently, almost as if hackers noticed them getting popular...