Microsoft Allows Users to Remove Software

by Taylor Flatt on March 8th, 2009 at 10:41 am EDT - 6,156 views

Microsoft finally allows users to remove software that they include on your system when you buy their new Operating System, Windows 7, next year. In response to the EU’s protests and the US’s anti-trust suits they are finally allowing users to remove key programs like Internet Explorer and Media Player from their system by placing an icon in the Control Panel.

However, when you “remove” it from your system, it will remain installed but lack substinence. This is a big step forward from all the years of problems Microsoft has faced under Bill Gates regarding these issues. Now, it seems, that the new CEO will be complying more and more with international governments to eliminate such obstacles.

These new developments are gold to the ears of companies like Google and Mozilla who have been bottle necked by the bundling Microsoft has done to quell competition over the years.

Image courtesy of thetechherald.

Microsoft’s Own ‘Easy Button’

by Nathaniel Ed on February 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm EDT - 987 views

Recently Microsoft started implementing it’s latest invention: a ‘Fix it’ button on its self help pages. It isn’t very widespread as of now, but the project is quickly gaining ground, seeing as how it started off with roughly four automatic ‘fix-its’ in December, and now it has grown to about 100 different ‘fix-its.’

To see how it worked, I decided to personally to try out this new feature. I found an easy one for me to try: The Internet Explorer icon is missing from your desktop. Upon arriving on the page, the button stuck out rather quickly. They still have manual fix instructions for Do-It-Yourselfers, but now you can automatically do it.

First of all, I put my IE icon in my recycle bin, then emptied the bin. Next, I clicked on the ‘Fix-It’ button, and a download message appeared. I chose to save the file, and an install wizard came up, so I installed the program that was designed to put an IE icon on my desktop. Next it required me to restart my computer, which I did. Then I noticed that the icon appeared without restarting my computer, but I went ahead and took the advise of the wizard and restarted my computer.

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5 Reasons Why IE Fails

by Taylor Flatt on December 31st, 2008 at 12:57 am EDT - 2,199 views

 Internet Explorer, the gateway to the internet, or so it was back in the day is anything but now. Currently, there are several decent browsers that can get you to the same place faster, safer and easier. With an unbiased approach, I will look into the reasons why IE has and is beginning to fail. From CSS interpretations to memory usage IE has gone downhill.

Over the years Microsoft has prided itself in bringing technology and service to use who aren’t as fortunate to have the resources to do it ourselves. However, over the years, it seems that Microsoft has strayed from this path and has gone down a more adventitious avenue seeking more fame than actual usability and safety.

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Follow-up on IE Security Breach

by Taylor Flatt on December 22nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm EDT - 197 views

Microsoft has finally started giving insight of this bug that has actually been present for 9 years.  Microsoft said that the error was one that was never tested for.  Although they know of such bugs, they haven’t been training their staff to handle such issues which has essentially caused this major panic.  

To find the bug and to test for ones like this, which are called TOCTOU bugs (Memory errors), they had to use “fuzzers”.  These fuzzers would test out the software by dumping information into various parts and try to trigger a bug.  Since they didn’t have a fuzzer for TOCTOU errors, there was no way to find it.  The bug was not only present in recent browsers, but was traced all the way back to IE 5 (1999).  Micheal Howard, principal security manager at Microsoft had this to say about the bug,

“In theory, fuzz testing could find this bug, but today there is no fuzz test case for this code,” he said. “Triggering the bug would require a fuzzing tool that builds data streams with multiple data binding constructs with the same identifier. Random (or dumb) fuzzing payloads of this data type would probably not trigger the bug, however.”

Basically what he is saying here is that they had no idea an error existed and that there was really no way to test for it until people began to exploit it.

Although Microsoft was able to provide countermeasures to the folks using Vista, they could not, however, provide such countermeasures to those using Windows XP (which is out used 3:1 compared to Vista).  This was a tragic flaw that in the future, we hope they will be able to spot such bugs and not allow those within the program.  The bug could have been worse, but me being a Chrome/Firefox user, am thankful that I stopped using IE a long time ago.

What did you do when you hear this news?

Source: ComputerWorld