Microsoft

Microsoft, Security and your Pocketbook

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It does not look like Microsoft is taking security as seriously as their cash flow:

Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft’s IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the operating system costs $199.
That, analysts say, is a steep price to pay to secure a browser that swept the market as a free, standalone product.
“It’s a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser,” said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. “It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP.”
This is, though, just the tip of the iceberg. Many of these older systems, 49.2% of the Microsoft OS base, run on machines that can not support XP in a usable form. My family has 3 of these as well as a couple newer machines that have the memory and processor speed to support XP.
So, it is not just a matter of a $99 or $199 OS for the many people who would have to by new hardware to support XP.
But, this is also one reason why I run Firefox and Thunderbird on all our PCs.

Microsupport

This entry was posted in Microsoft on by

Elizabeth Lawley found this pretty funny:

Things that you can do to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

And it is funny. Plus they apparently have forgotten about right click, copy link location, paste which is much easier and much quicker.
As I read through the knowledge base article I wondered, and still wonder, just how many users will ever read this or if they do start reading the article will get far enough to find this nifty JScript command that you can paste (not type) into your address bar (IE or Moz) to compare a sites actual URL to the URL in the address bar:

javascript:alert(“The actual URL is:\t\t” + location.protocol + “//” + location.hostname + “/” + “\nThe address URL is:\t\t” + location.href + “\n” + “\nIf the server names do not match, this may be a spoof.”);

If the URLs don’t match you likely want to leave that site quickly especially if you thought it was your bank.