OzHub, the Macquarie Telecom-led cloud computing alliance, has come down firmly on the side of Optus over the copyright controversy surrounding Optus TV Now, warning that any moves to change the law "risk branding Australia a global luddite state."
Whether you’ve ‘upgraded’ to Firefox or another browser, XP users with IE 6 will start being asked to update to IE 7 through Microsoft’s automatic update process, while in related news, a ‘green coloured’ address bar in IE 7 should signify a site is ‘safe’, but can you trust it?
Microsoft has begun the automatic update process for users of IE 6 on computers running genuine versions of Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Window XP x64, with the rollout process expected to take months.
That’s because Microsoft doesn’t want to flood their servers with requests for IE 7 updates from users around the world. English language users started seeing requests to update the IE browser from November 1.
On Wednesday November 15, users of Windows XP or better in German, French, Spanish, Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese and Arabic will start seeing update notifications as well, with other languages to follow throughout 2007.
Users are not forced into upgrading to IE 7 right away, with users able to block the update from installation, with administrators also able to prevent the update on their business fleets of computers until they are ready to allow the update to happen. For Microsoft’s full schedule of IE 7 updates, visit this site.
But eventually, this is likely to become a mandatory update, as it upgrades the baseline security for genuine Windows XP users and gives them a host of new features in Internet Explorer that have albeit already been available for some time in competing browsers such as Firefox, Maxthon and others.
Part of the security improvements in IE 7 include a better anti-phishing system to help users detect fraudulent sites they have accidentally clicked on through emails purporting to be from their bank, or have somehow accidentally stumbled upon.
Unfortunately, the framework for exactly what how this will work reliably is still in the draft stages at the CA Broswer Forum, as reported by ZDNet.
This brings me to TrustDefender www.trustdefender.com, a piece of software that I’ve disclosed in a previous article has been written by friends in Australia and has emerged from a year long beta program to be released as a final product that’s free to download and use.
According to the developers, TrustDefender is the only software capable of telling you with certainty whether the site you’re visiting really is the one you meant to visit, with an excellent ‘Guaranteed Authentication Program’ for banks and other institutions to enter, and a ‘Trusted Surfing Database’ to let users see what others on the Internet thought about the site you’re about to visit, especially if it is a brand new site that hasn’t been seen before.
After all, if you think the site you’re visiting is your bank, but TrustDefender is telling you the site is only a day or two old, with few or no users trusting it, you’d be mad to ignore that unmissable warning and visit the site and then enter your bank log-in details anyway.
Of course it’s not only banks that the phishers are targeting, but a host of sites including auction sites, social networking sites and almost any site that you have to log into. And while companies such as Symantec, McAfee and others purport to have software that does the same or similar things, my developer friends have shown me how those solutions are incomplete and are fallible, whereas TrustDefender has been engineered from the ground up to be virtually bulletproof. While I believe this, that's obviously a claim you'll have to judge for yourself.
I don’t make software recommendations lightly, whether the developers are friends or not, so while you might wait to update to IE 7 because you’re already happily using an alternate browser, why wait for supposedly top class anti-phishing and other web based authentication security in IE 7 when it hasn’t even left the CA Browser Forum draft process yet?
TrustDefender certainly seems worth trying, especially at the hard to resist price of free, and it works with whichever browser you choose to use.
David Frost
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