Google Warning for PC and Internet Explorer users

CameraQuest · 05-12-2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6645895.stm

Google estimates 1 in 10 web pages have malicious code that could infect a user's PC.

To me this warning makes a strong argument to use any other browser EXCEPT Microsoft's Internet Explorer (such as Firefox), and to use Macs instead of PC's.

Stephen

POSTI-Tuomo · 05-12-2007

Yep. Also having a good firewall (software or hardware) plugging all the holes in your system is a good idea. Kerio is my choice, but I'm sure there are others as well. Then you'll just need to mop up any other crap left on your comp with softwares like Ad-Aware, CCleaner etc. I have used this combo with success.

40oz · 05-13-2007

did the kind folks at google bother to give the percentage of pages that see 90% of the traffic? Noooo

They did mention that the 10% with "malicious content" are serving either porn or "0-days,hacks, cracks, and exploits." Moral of the story? Keep your nose clean, and your computer will follow

Seriously, the latest versions of IE are pretty impermeable to hostile software. But plenty of companies still produce software that functions via IE, and require the user to run it with very low security. Too many companies that use network functionality drag their feet when it comes to understanding network security, so the home user is actually better protected than someone working in a travel agency or shipping office.

ywenz · 05-13-2007

When everyone switches over to Mac's all the malicious codes out there will be directed at Macs, and the cycle continues...

If 100% of the sites you visit is RFF and CNN, the change of you hitting a malicous site is what?

gavinlg · 05-13-2007

all I know is that I'll never use another PC ever again after using my new imac 20 for the last few weeks.

This is just an excess advantage

amateriat · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by ywenz

When everyone switches over to Mac's all the malicious codes out there will be directed at Macs, and the cycle continues...

Could happen, but likely at nowhere near the magnitude of a legacy-burdened OS such as Windows. MS, no doubt, would like to have built an OS from scratch like Apple did with OS X, but, perversely, were held back by the very fact of their being the "majority platform" with lots of legacy code to carry forth (or incur the wrath of end-users – big and small – whose operations, software, and/or peripherals rely on said code, if it were omitted). This has come to a head with the introduction of Vista, which is leaving a lot of would-be upgraders in the cold unless they (a) gut a fair amount of their current PCs' innards in order to run the OS reasonably well, or (b) trash their current PCs – more than a few of which aren't exactly elderly – wholesale for something new. And let's not even get started with issues surrounding peripherals.

Yes, I use Macs exclusively, but I'm not sitting smug; I have to fix and tweak PCs for a lot of my clients, and the question of whether to upgrade to Vista or stick with XP (for now, I recommend the latter, even though I have lots of issues with XP...better the devil you know and all that), isn't a trifling question. All I care about is keeping their headaches to a minimum if I can.

- Barrett

ywenz · 05-13-2007

The Mac OS was crap prior to OS X.. Who says MS can't come up with a monster OS one day?

amateriat · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by ywenz

The Mac OS was crap prior to OS X.. Who says MS can't come up with a monster OS one day?

Crap? I don't think so. Outdated in a number of ways? Certainly, and X has addressed the matter quite soundly. (But no OS is perfect.)

As far as Redmond is concerned, I have no doubt that they could build, and offer, a killer OS right now. But they can't, not without upsetting the legacy-code applecart (sorry) that's such a big part of their "majority status". Apple could afford to take a gamble with an new OS that cut nearly all ties with the past because (as so many PC adherents kept reminding me), percentage-wise, they had a lot less to lose. But a lot to gain if things worked as planned, which is more or less what's happened.

I'm making no predictions right now. But these are interesting times indeed.

- Barrett

kshapero · 05-13-2007

I started on Macs in 1984. I switched in 1998 because I don't like being held hostage by one company. Never looked back. Now I use a PC and IE and Firefox, and 3 or 4 anti virus, spyware and firewall applets behind the scenes. As a curious person, I am all over the place on the web. I never have any problems with malicious whatevers. So there!

John Rountree · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by ywenz

The Mac OS was crap prior to OS X.. Who says MS can't come up with a monster OS one day?

Uhhhmmm... what's stoping them? It seems pretty obvious that if they could, they would!

BrianPhotog · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Rountree

Uhhhmmm... what's stoping them? It seems pretty obvious that if they could, they would!

Having to maintain the idiots who still use software they bought last century.

Windows 95 was software compatible all the way back to DOS 3.x.

ywenz · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by amateriat

Crap? I don't think so. Outdated in a number of ways? Certainly, and X has addressed the matter quite soundly. (But no OS is perfect.)

Cooperative multitasking on Mac OS in 2001 while PC users have enjoyed pre-emptive multi tasking ever since 1995 - that is crap. I used a Mac at the school's lab and going back home to use Windows 2000 was a breath of fresh air.

The user friendly nature of the MacOS made it impossible to troubleshoot. At the studio where I used to work, our AVID workstations suddenly stopped booting up one day. No error messages displayed the user - just a grey screen and a mouse pointer. After a costly support call to AVID tech support, and after going thru their generic checklist, it was discovered that a loose SCSI connector was the culprit. On a PC, a bad SCSI connection would surely have caused some sort of error message in the boot-up screen.

Currently I am diggin' my MacBook however.. but I also have bootcamp + WinXP installed on it.

350D_user · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by ywenz

The Mac OS was crap prior to OS X.. Who says MS can't come up with a monster OS one day?

One day? Well, I'm sure they've had enough time to come up with something.

350D_user · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by kshapero

I started on Macs in 1984. I switched in 1998 because I don't like being held hostage by one company. Never looked back.

... and you're happy being held "hostage" with Apple?

Quote:

Originally Posted by kshapero

So there!

Yup.

rxmd · 05-13-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Rountree

Uhhhmmm... what's stoping them? It seems pretty obvious that if they could, they would!

You could have said the same about Apple when they were stuck developing Taligent, Coplant and Rhapsody for ages without any significant progress, and when they were forced to release intermediate unconvincing OSes like 8.5 and 9 with increasing stability problems, before getting it right with OS X. At that time Apple actually had a bigger R&D budget than many Silicon Valley companies, but left many projects unfinished and put out increasingly mediocre products. Apple in the late 1990s was a classic example of how not to run a company.

Microsoft is stuck at the moment. The NT line produced some quite decent operating systems in Windows 2000 and XP, and there are some things they definitely have got right. One notable example is binary compatibility; I can still run many of 1991's Windows 3.0 applications unmodified with XP, which can be quite important for corporate clients and which is impossible with either MacOS X or most free Unixes. But with Vista it's now evident that development has reached a dead point. You can tell that Microsoft is stuck by a couple of highly-awaited, ever-moved, never-finished components that were supposed to be at the core of every consecutive new OS release (such as Windows Filing System), and also by the increasingly hectic marketing strategies and the recent focus on software patents and litigation. I see Vista a bit like MacOS 8.5. I guess that after Vista or Vista's successor there will be a more radical break somewhere.

kshapero · 05-14-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by 350D_user

... and you're happy being held "hostage" with Apple?

Yup.

hey, whatever floats your boat.

John Camp · 05-14-2007

I once owned a piece of a book store, which ran its inventory on bookstore-specific inventory/sales software written for Windows. The software company eventually folded, as most do, but the book store still had 50,000+ volumes on that software with no easy way to move them to new software. The old software ran fine -- as long as it ran on Windows. This is, written small, the problem MS has with a lot of its customers. Sooner or later, though, a company has to bite the bullet and say, "We're starting new." MS could do it; it'd just irritate a lot of people, and also damage quite a few. If you have dead-ended software with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of items on it, you can literally go bankrupt trying to change to a new system.

MS, of course, claimed in courts all over the world that it's not effectively a monopoly, and the wierd thing is, it's possible that they believe it, and see threats everywhere. But right now, I think the main threat to MS is itself, and its refusal to thoroughly modernize from the bottom up. They keep trying to buy patches to fix things; but I'm not sure that's possible any longer.

I switched to Macs several years ago, because they seemed like toasters -- if you needed to do several specific common things (in my case, word processing, Photoshop and browsing the net) then they were fine. If you wanted to do some other things, like run a modern highway map program, learn Urdu, or use some kind of odd function-specific hardware, then they weren't so fine. And I doubt that they ever will be -- Macs are consumer machines, like iPods. They offer ease of use, rather than range of function.

JC