So why are you still running Internet Explorer?

Here are some of the main reasons NOT to use IE:

• It’s full of security holes – being integrated with the OS is a Bad Idea. There’s too much complexity in deciding whether a file operation should be allowed or not. Is the browser running as a file explorer or as a “normal” browser?
• It’s terrible at web standards – ask anyone who has to design a website and they’ll tell you about the recurring nightmares they have about getting sites to work in IE.
• It’s slow – rendering pages takes forever, especially if a site incorporates JavaScript.
• Updates aren’t provided in a timely manner. One of the reasons that the latest security scare has become so big, is that Microsoft only release patches once a month. That gives malware writers a full months head-start before a patch may be released.

So if security and privacy are important to you, then switch to another browser. There’s quite a few out there, available for free, and much better than Internet Explorer.

• Firefox,
• Safari,
• Opera,
• Google Chrome,
• Netscape Navigator, and
• a whole lot more

EDIT: For those of you that didn’t, or won’t, take my advice, here’s the patch to fix the latest security problem with IE. One more word of advice: Get used to patching IE, this is not going to be the last security issue you’ll have to deal with.

I played around with using VNC, but the connection was much more flakey and slower than a RDC session would be. It was with some relief that I found this post from “Fran Goes Blog” with a solution. It worked a treat. Thanks Fran.

As my XP system uses Internet Explorer 7, that’s the only version of IE that I’m able to check with. However, according to my stats, on average 10% of my visitors are using IE 6, which is more than are using IE 7. (BTW, if you are still using IE 6, I recommend that at the very least you upgrade to IE 7, or better still, a better browser – *cough* Firefox *cough*) So, while testing for IE 6 is a bit problematic for me, it’s something that I need to do.

Luckily, there is a solution. Thanks to TredoSoft, it’s possible to install IE 3, 4, 5, 5.5, and 6 in one go. Get Multiple IE here. If you need to check your site in these versions of IE, then Multiple IE is a must have.

It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars

By Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates’ retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.

Many outside the computer field credit Microsoft for advances which it only took advantage of, such as making computers cheap and fast, and convenient graphical user interfaces.

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Many computerists specially hate Gates and Microsoft. They have plenty of reasons.

‘Solicit funds’

Microsoft persistently engages in anti-competitive behaviour, and has been convicted three times. George W Bush, who let Microsoft off the hook for the second US conviction, was invited to Microsoft headquarters to solicit funds for the 2000 election.

In the UK, Microsoft established a major office in Gordon Brown’s constituency.

Many users hate the “Microsoft tax”, the retail contracts that make you pay for Windows on your computer even if you won’t use it.

In some countries you can get a refund, but the effort required is daunting.

There’s also the Digital Restrictions Management: software features designed to “stop” you from accessing your files freely. Increased restriction of users seems to be the main advance of Vista.

‘Gratuitous incompatibilities’

Then there are the gratuitous incompatibilities and obstacles to interoperation with other software. This is why the EU required Microsoft to publish interface specifications.

This year Microsoft packed standards committees with its supporters to procure ISO approval of its unwieldy, unimplementable and patented “open standard” for documents. The EU is now investigating this.

These actions are intolerable, of course, but they are not isolated events. They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don’t recognise: proprietary software.

Microsoft’s software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don’t have the source code that programmers can read and change.

If you’re a programmer and you want to change the software, for yourself or for someone else, you can’t.

If you’re a business and you want to pay a programmer to make the software suit your needs better, you can’t. If you copy it to share with your friend, which is simple good-neighbourliness, they call you a “pirate”.

‘Unjust system’

Microsoft would have us believe that helping your neighbour is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship.

The most important thing that Microsoft has done is to promote this unjust social system.

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, “If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!”

‘Change system’

But Gates didn’t invent proprietary software, and thousands of other companies do the same thing. It’s wrong, no matter who does it.

Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you. A change in executives or companies is not important. What we need to change is this system.

That’s what the free software movement is all about. “Free” refers to freedom: we write and publish software that users are free to share and modify.

We do this systematically, for freedom’s sake; some of us paid, many as volunteers. We already have complete free operating systems, including GNU/Linux.

Our aim is to deliver a complete range of useful free software, so that no computer user will be tempted to cede her freedom to get software.

In 1984, when I started the free software movement, I was hardly aware of Gates’ letter. But I’d heard similar demands from others, and I had a response: “If your software would keep us divided and helpless, please don’t write it. We are better off without it. We will find other ways to use our computers, and preserve our freedom.”

In 1992, when the GNU operating system was completed by the kernel, Linux, you had to be a wizard to run it. Today GNU/Linux is user-friendly: in parts of Spain and India, it’s standard in schools. Tens of millions use it, around the world. You can use it too.

Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now.

Dismantling them is up to us.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. You can copy and redistribute this article under the Creative Commons Noderivs license.

Update 18 December 2007:

I’ve discovered a better way to force Finder to browse the contents of a network drive. You can read more here.

I wrote recently about the problems that I was having connecting to a network drive from my MacBook.

I still haven’t solved the problem, but I have come across something else: If I share a drive on my Windows XP computer, the computer will be displayed in the Finder Window, along with my network drive. I can browse the Windows machine, but for some reason, I still can’t browse the network drive.

In order to increase security and to protect against attack, Microsoft have introduced a new driver signing requirement in Vista. By requiring that drivers are signed, Microsoft hoped that this would ensure that only drivers which were verified as being clean and compatible with Vista could be installed.

ATI duly had their drivers signed by VeriSign so that they could be installed on a Windows Vista system. Unfortunately, their was a flaw in one of the drivers. Apparently the flaw was originally intended as a shortcut in the driver that allowed ATI developers to load modules into the driver for testing. When the driver was released, either no-one thought to remove the shortcut or ATI forgot about it.

In order to close the hole, ATI will have to patch the flaw in their driver, have it signed with a new certificate, roll-out the update via Windows Update, then have the original signing authority revoke the original certificate. It’s not a straightforward process and it’s by no means foolproof either.

I tried searching Google and the Microsoft Knowledge Base for answers, but not one of the pages I found seemed to deal with my particular problem. Given that the problem would resolve itself after a hard restart I began to think that it might be a hardware problem – this kind of symptom might be related to a component which wasn’t initialising correctly, and was causing the OS to blue-screen. By the time I restarted the system, it had “warmed up”, and that’s why it was only on every second boot that I was seeing the problem.

This particular machine is only a couple of months old, and as you can imagine I wasn’t too happy that it was beginning to fail on me, especially as I store all my important data on it.

But more in hope than expectation I decided to ignore the possibility of a hardware issue, and troubleshoot the software side. From experience I’ve found that more often than not when Windows blue-screens it’s driver related, and even more often than not the driver responsible is the video driver.

My PC has an nVidia Geforce 7500 card, so I updated the drivers to the latest ForceWare driver version 94.24. A quick restart, and the problem was solved.

While my problem is resolved, I don’t know what caused it in the first place. I haven’t installed or changed anything on the machine in a while, except for the usual Microsoft Updates. The only thing that I can think of is that an update from Microsoft didn’t like the video driver on my computer, and that there was a timing issue with the initialisation of the driver. That’s not s definitive answer, but I think it’s a fairly decent guess.

That changed today when they shared the stage at the All Things Digital conference. BBC News have a write up of how this “friendly chat” turned out. There’s also highlights of the talk from the AllThingsD site.

Microsoft’s education and business manager stated that would be working to allow access at any time, at any place and on any device. Based on Microsoft’s previous strategies, it seems likely that any technologies introduced will be proprietary and Windows only, leaving students using other OS’s out in the cold. Though only time will tell.

BITS is used by Windows Update to automatically download updates in the background and by Microsoft Messenger to transfer files. The fault lies in the fact that BITS bypasses any installed firewalls, and does not require any suspicious actions to start the download. By using BITS, an attacker could automatically download whatever they wanted to your computer, including password/ credit card logging software, remote access control software, the possibilities are endless.

While there are no major infections using this method, it is just a matter of time before one does come along. Hopefully, Microsoft will have addressed the issue before that happens.