Microsoft: Just Say No

Hackers have discovered that Google's new Desktop interface exposes a user's pc to vulnerability when Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the chosen browser.

Maton Gillan at hacker demonstrates how to employ MS's notoriously flawed browser to gain access to user information on a pc. This is, of course, just the latest in the continuous stream of new ways to hack Microcsoft's crap-ass OS and other software, like Office and IE, that seemlessly allows easy access to a pc through any number of vulnerabilities. You might have thought people would have taken a little more notice when the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about Internet Explorer, which essentially said, punt it. As a reminder, this is what US-CERT said back in June:

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites.

I can't begin to imagine why anyone uses MS junk anymore. I really can't. Microsoft's history of draconian marketing practices and anti-trust violations combined with their insecure and buggy OS should be enough to move the business community -- the biggest users of MS products -- away from MS. But resistance to such a move seems to be driven, not be any good reason, but simply by inertia and, as Kunstler has called it, the psychology of previous investment: the notion that humans will resist recognising that a large investment made sometime ago may have been just plain bad.