The wonders of Windows: worms, worms, worms

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 06 January 2009 01:59

Opinion and Analysis

There are times when this blog makes a foray into the wonderful world of Windows to examine some of the reasons why people delight in running that operating system.
Most often, these excursions are made because there is no way out - it is part of the administration of this mysterious desktop, part of the joy that I'm sure every Windows user has experienced at least once.

I have a single Windows machine at home, down from three a few years back. There is no way to eliminate this machine as the good wife needs it for work reasons.

A couple of days back, the inevitable signs of worms began to surface on said machine - you know, the increasing number of pop-ups, the renaming of browser sessions and so on. None of the drives could be opened using the familiar double-click.

Despite there being working up-to-date anti-virus software on the machine, Internet Explorer had delivered a New Year gift - something known as the GodZilla worm.

IE is a wonderful browser; it cannot be removed (part of the choice offered by Microsoft - our way or the highway) as it is a set of libraries and one of them, MSHTML.dll, serves several functions on Windows. It has hooks into the innards of the system and can, on occasion, play the role of Samson and pull the whole house down. Doesn't need to have long hair or a beard to do that either.

It would have been good to have some equivalent of Delilah on Windows to negate the role of this browser, but, sadly there is none. There are some third-party applications like XPlite , developed by Australian Shane Brooks, which do remove most of IE but then which browser do you use to update Windows? Only IE supports ActiveX.

You can, of course, move from XP to Vista where the updates are done through the control panel but that would be the equivalent of offering a man a choice between arsenic and cyanide for breakfast.

Not for nothing did Geoff Palmer, a PCWorld columnist in New Zealand, come out with this killer introduction to one of his columns: "If Internet Explorer was a dog, someone would have shot it long ago. It’s been quietly savaging users for years; bypassing security, giving up confidential information and acting as a vector for all manner of viruses, worms, Trojans, key loggers and spyware."

Why do people use IE? One might as well ask why people smoke.

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