Anyone picked up any viruses or worms ("malware" is the trendy term) on the Bloggernacle this week? I think my home computer received a file "rundlg32.cab" from the home page at T&S over the weekend, one of those nasty "redirect your home page and screw up the registry" types. It might have had something to do with the map showing Florida hurricane paths. In addition, another computer I use with a recently-enhanced firewall now refuses to load the T&S home page, which suggests either that the scripting on the home page is just too suspicious or that a specific piece of bad code is being detected. Anyone else have problems last week?
This seems off-topic for a Bloggernacle post, but we are all dependent on the medium. No open Internet, no Bloggernacle. I'm no techie, but I have observed a real leap forward in the ability of malicious adware and spyware to clog and sometimes kill computers in the last couple of months. I'm considering dropping IE and moving to an alternate browser out of simple self-protection. The alternative (based on the advice of people who know what they are talking about) is to have a full range of always-updated software protectors on every computer (firewall, NAV, AdAware, Search & Destroy, CWShredder, Spy Sweeper, and HiJackThis) and run them regularly, which will take care of most (but not all) of the problems. And there's always the ultimate protest--buy a Mac.
I've noticed most folks with Wordpress are rabid partisans who want to tear down the walls of Internet Explorer and replace it with Mozilla Firefox.
Posted by: danithew | Sep 27, 2004 at 04:05 PM
Yes, Mozilla Firefox seems to be the replacement browser of choice in the discussions I have read.
Posted by: Dave | Sep 27, 2004 at 05:06 PM
My son got hijacked last week and I spent the better part of a day on the phone with him, helping him get rid of the thing...he had a quiz to take, and couldn't browse to the web site where the quiz was! After we got him all cleaned up, he downloaded Firefox. And so did I.
I'm not opposed to Micro$oft; I think their quest for world domination is a wonderful and admirable goal. I'm glad the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to fund research into such horrific but unsexy diseases as malaria.
But until they can let me browse the web without messing with my OS, I'm done with IE.
Posted by: Ann | Sep 27, 2004 at 06:49 PM
We dropped IE for NN7.1 about an hour ago. This spring we switched to Firefox. We will never go back to IE. I only use IE at work, but that is because that is the supported browser. I also have to do file browsing to shared network drives and the like, so IE comes in handy then.
Posted by: Kim Siever | Sep 27, 2004 at 11:06 PM
Firefox is definitely the way to go. IE is simply a security nightmare waiting to happen. I've fixed so many computers taken over by IE holes that it isn't funny. Of course for *real* security, spend the extra $200 and get a Mac. Much more pleasant internet experience.
Posted by: Clark Goble | Sep 28, 2004 at 11:41 AM
BTW - it is fairly easy to code an error on a page. Especially if you are doing "ad hoc" development of a blog. I apparently had a bug on my blog for a few months that didn't allow IE users to select text. It was because of a bug with the html starting tag that specified the document type. Worked great with the Mac version of IE, the PC versions of Mozilla class browsers, all the Linux browsers, and all the other Mac browsers. But IE didn't handle the tag right for a bizarre reason. I didn't even know until someone mentioned it. (Simply because when I tested under IE it displayed right)
Posted by: Clark Goble | Sep 28, 2004 at 11:44 AM
I've been using Mozilla instead of IE and Outlook since the summer of 2000. Mozilla's built-in pop-up blocker seems to work better than the IE pop-up blocking plug-ins, like Google and Yahoo! toolbars. And tabbed browsing is wonderful.
If you really want to avoid Windows viruses, you should switch to Mozilla's Thunderbird Email Client instead of using Outlook as well. Of course, if you mindlessly click on an email attachment that ends in .exe, .pif, .reg, .bat, or .scr, it wont matter what client you use. But other than these kind of email viruses that require you to open an attachment to infect your computer, using Thunderbird will stop all of the self-propagating viruses that take advantage of Outlook to infect your computer.
Thunderbird can be used to read multiple email accounts and the latest version also can be used to subscribe to and read RSS and ATOM feeds.
I haven't been infected by a virus since the summer of 2000.
Posted by: Ebenezer | Sep 28, 2004 at 02:43 PM
I don't pretend those making comments are a representative sample of the browsing universe, but it sounds to me like Explorer is going to see its market share plummet over the next couple of months.
Posted by: Dave | Sep 28, 2004 at 03:13 PM
See http://www.timesandseasons.org/wp/index.php?p=1369 for the explanation. And sorry about the bug, everyone. It can probably be blamed on Steve Evans. Along with all of the other evils of society.
Posted by: Kaimi | Sep 28, 2004 at 05:40 PM
Thanks for weighing in, Kaimi. I'll give it another whack this weekend (after my new family network administrator gets done upgrading the software on the afflicted machine) and give a report here. Without access to T&S, I feel like I'm really missing out. Any links to an active T&S syndication feed site anyone would like to post? Live Journal? Syndic8? The T&S Bloglines feed stops at September 2, for some reason.
Posted by: Dave | Sep 28, 2004 at 07:12 PM