The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Last week the department of Homeland Security in the U.S. did something they have not done in the few years since they have existed. In cooperation with a few other arcane departments of the U.S. government (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), Homeland Security issued a warning to users of personal computers that they may want to consider using other software to browse the Internet than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Very interesting. Last year, responding to myriad complaints regarding the security of their products, Bill Gates himself said that he was moving towards security being the main job and concern his company was going to tackle. Now the U.S. government is recommending that personal computer users who use Internet Explorer (IE) as their main tool to surf the Internet (by some reports, as many as 95% of computer users) should be looking for other software. Malicious code, Trojan horses, and viruses of all types are dangerously on the rise across the globe. They are costing billions of dollars per year in lost productivity and in charges to fix computers. The latest large-scale virus came at the end of June. Originating out of Russia, it took advantage of an IE security hole to download a virus and a keylogger program to computers when users simply visited an infected website. Microsoft has not issued a true update for IE for several years, and the constant release of security patches are obviously not working. Just as with agriculture, when a single type of plant takes over an area, called a monoculture, it is very susceptible to disease. So what are the options for browsers? As usual, owners of Mac computers face few worries. With Apple retaining about a 5% market share, not many people are going out of their way to write viruses for Macs. As far as browsers go, Mac users have a few options, IE being one of them. Otherwise, Apple has produced its own neat and slick browser called Safari and its built in features such as tabbed browsing and a built-in search engine right on the browser itself are beginning to be copied by other companies. The main browser I use for my Mac was developed in Japan by a small company called Shiira. Feeling much like Safari, Shiira is a much smaller download, more customizable, and faster overall. If you are looking for something different, it is definitely worth a look. People using IE and Windows machines have many choices as well, they just need to be searched for. The most promising two of these are Mozilla's latest entry titled Firefox, and a browser widely used in Europe called Opera. Mozilla is a small company spun off of the dying Netscape which is now owned by AOL. It is open-source and always under development. Firefox is amazing. Feeling slick and fast, Mozilla has watched Apple's Safari browser and learned a lot of lessons from it about ease of use. Firefox has built in tabbed browsing, a customizable interface with a lot of different skins available for download, and a built in search bar on the interface. It is small as well, making it a much faster download then IE. Along with this, Mozilla is also offering Thunderbird, its email software for free. A second strong option for Windows users is Opera. This small company holds a large part of the European browser market, used by up to 50% of surfers in some countries. It again is small, elegant, and widely used with fast download times and very few troubles being compatible with any of the content you will experience online. This is actually one of Opera's greatest strengths, coming already setup and ready to access video, audio, and animation files online. The one main drawback with Opera is that it can cost. Like all of the other browsers mentioned here, Opera is available as a free download, but every time you use it, a banner ad will flow across the top of the interface. To get rid of this ad, simply throw down 39 U.S. dollars and the company will give you a keycode to make the ads disappear. We pay for almost all other types of software, so why not pay for a top quality browser as well? None of these browsers will guarantee you absolutely safe, secure browsing, and you will still be able to download a virus easily through email, but using them means that hackers will not be able to directly download code straight to your machine while you are online. They're worth a look. ([email protected])
