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more "Trustworthy Computing"

June 12, 2002 › Sandy McMurray | comment

Imagine this: you hear on the radio that your car has been recalled. A design flaw, recently discovered by Consumer Reports, may cause the vehicle to explode in certain situations.

You're alarmed at first, but the manufacturer says it's aware of the problem, and promises to fix it for you "very soon."

Weeks later, after some inconvenient but free repairs, your car is back on the road. Very few cars exploded before the company figured out how to fix the problem. Life goes on.

A few weeks later, the company announces that a slightly different design flaw has been pointed out to them by the editors of Car & Driver. Again you spend a few days waiting before your car can be fixed. Again there's no charge for the repair. But your trust is eroded a bit. You begin to wonder if your car is safe.

Now imagine this happens, oh, ten or twelve times in a year, to most of the cars on the planet, because one company controls more than 90% of the auto industry.

In case you haven't figured out my clumsy analogy, the car is software and Microsoft has issued yet another security warning to people who use Internet Explorer.

As of this writing, there's no solution for this problem. [Update: a patch for this security hole was posted June 14.] For now, your best course of action is to avoid using Microsoft software. You should probably stay off the Web and avoid e-mail until the company releases a software patch, just in case. You might want to go down to the storm cellar and bolt the door for a few days.

Once you've installed the latest fix, everything will be fine, right?

P.S. I realize there's a certain amount of irony in having this post immediately follow the one in which I urged you to abandon Netscape 4. I didn't say you had to switch to IE. Just try something else is all I'm saying. This is still a good time to shop around.

June 12, 2002 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item