Slept in this morning. It wasn’t a peaceful, restful night’s sleep due to all the sinus crap in my head making it difficult to (1) breathe and (2) lay down. I slept almost completely upright in the recliner. Kind of defeats the definition of a recliner, huh? Ben woke me about 9am. I helped him finish packing his suitcase.
I then sit down at the computer. No surprise there. This is a normal morning activity. Twitterific is loading all the Twitter tweets from the time I turned off the computer last night. So I quickly scroll through them. There is this tweet from Sitepoint:
“Stop Using Internet Explorer Warns German Government http://bit.ly/8kLeg5“
Me being the geek that I am, clicked on the tweet’s link so that I could read the article, thinking “wow, this is news?” The fact of the matter is that the German Government is officially recommending that people STOP using Internet Explorer all together. I am thinking, “this has been a recommendation in technology circles for years.”
I give the article fair chance to tell their story though. It is after all just reporting about the German Government’s stance on this – officially.
The article tells how the “official recommendation” comes after the revelation that IE was involved in the “Chinese attacks on Google GMail.” Not a real big surprise there if you ask me, but they didn’t ask me. I am just glad that the German Government is interested in this at all. Are they truly concerned about their people? I can’t say one way or the other, but someone big has made a public stand against a software giant and their bug infested, security hole filled software.
The article goes on to point out that the problem exists for ALL versions of Internet Explorer and ALL versions of Microsoft Windows EXCEPT 1 version of Internet Explorer on 1 version of Windows. That’s right folks, if you are lucky enough to be running an OLD version of Internet Explorer on an OLD version of more corporately geared software you are “safe.” How many of you are still running Internet Explorer 5? To be more specific, IE 5.01? How many of those are also running Windows 2000? Not too many? I didn’t think so.
Somehow, I find it amusing that the German Microsoft spokesperson would be defending his own company’s software. To the death. I am pretty sure that’s what he’s paid to do after all. His words, however, do not bring me peace of mind. Seriously!?!?!. Do you honestly think that I care that the “general users or consumers” are not affected by this? I mean, come on! The fact that anyone is affected by this is unsettling enough, but to be told:
“There is no threat to the general user, consequently we do not support this warning.”
I don’t care if the general consumer might not have the world’s richest bank’s records on their computers, the fact is my information is important to me. Period! Who are you to decide if my information might be “at risk” or not? I think that should be my decision. Period. Besides, if they are attacking bigger institutions and establishments, where do they stop? What if the get bored? Should even the general user and consumer be protected from malicious attacks? If there wasn’t a broad spread problem, you would not have the average computer user trying to figure out how to get the viruses, spyware, and malware off their computer systems. How do you think those things got there in the first place?
I did get a little chuckle out of the article’s statement:
“If you’re reading this article on SitePoint, you probably aren’t using IE: more than 75% of our visitors use alternative browsers.”
I do not fall in the less than 25% who do use IE. Like I said, the technology circles have already moved on. They are willing to try new things and if they like them, they stick. IE is not a one size fits all web browser. The fact is that there are things out there that do the job better, faster, and safer.
At any rate, you can read Sitepoint’s article here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/01/18/german-government-stop-using-ie/.
I should add that the French are getting in on the action too. Surprised? I’m not. You can read that article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7018669/France-warns-against-Internet-Explorer-use.html. I do have to warn you though, from the sounds of it the French still have Microsoft in their back pocket in that it clearly reads:
“security experts say that computer users should only use a different web browser if they are confident they know what they’re doing.”
What? If the computer user was “confident,” we wouldn’t be experiencing this problem in the first place. So it is OK to leave the unconfident, general user and consumer as prey to the jerk faced hackers and trouble makers of the world? I think not! If you are not a confident web user, you need a browser with less options than Internet Explorer. I recommend a child safe browser!
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