Popup Ads In Music Files
Monday, January 3rd, 2005 at 7:05 pmMany of my readers don’t know that in a previous life I worked on Internet Explorer 3.0 (or Internet Exploder as we called) ten years ago at Microsoft. I was part of the effort that stupidly, blindly and ignorantly insisted on making IE ‘developer friendly.’ In the process we made it the best friend a slimy ad-ware hacker never even dare dream of. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m so fucking sorry. Really.
Now there’s a scare that adware has penetrated the music file format and unfortunately, it’s more than a scare, I know of a few cases where this has struck.
Note in the article that the hole is not in WMA, not in DRM but in IE which is used as a component in the whole process.
Evil on top of stupidity on top of evil blessed by ignorance.
Sigh.
January 4th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
I don’t know about anybody else, Victor, but I forgive you.
January 4th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Ah, redemption Texas style. I’ll take it!
January 4th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
You mean YOU started this mess?
As long as your site still loads in Firefox, I’ll let you off the hook.
BTW, do people really buy DRM’d WMA?
January 4th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
> You mean YOU started this mess?
Matt, you’re a blue state snob. (see previous comment for red state open-mindedness).
> As long as your site still loads in
> Firefox, I’ll let you off the hook.
IE is down to 46% on this site so yea, maybe in a weird twisted way I’ve done some good for the world. Er, maybe…
> BTW, do people really buy DRM’d WMA?
MSN Music is for real, but this story is about wma on fileshare nets where the DRM technology is not used for buying, but for triggering IE — which is all you need to infect a machine but good.
January 4th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
IS my left-coasted-ness really that obvious? :)
So if your IE is patched, are you safe, or is there some other inherent problem that can’t be overcome through browsing patching?
January 4th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
> IS my left-coasted-ness really
> that obvious? :)
;)
> So if your IE is patched, are you
> safe, or is there some other
> inherent problem that can’t be
> overcome through browsing patching?
The real answser is complicated. For now assume that ‘typical’ usage of IE (and any program that embeds it) is simply dangerous, patch or no.
January 9th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
Popup Ads In Music Files - I never saw such
January 19th, 2005 at 2:59 pm
Apparently a fix is in the works:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20050119/1020249_F.shtml
January 23rd, 2005 at 7:23 pm
Developing IE 3 has to be bittersweet. On the one hand, you helped to establish the dominance of IE; on the other, it was the first good version of IE. You can be proud of that.