BOINC’d by Aliens: Reader Greg A. warns that users running the SETI@home screen saver may be vulnerable to alien invasions. The SETI project, which uses the spare clock-cycles of 4.7 million machines to search the heavens for intelligent life, recently switched to a client based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (or BOINC — no, I’m not making this up). BOINC automatically updates users’ software, which could potentially allow some deviant creature to invade SETI@home systems via a back door. Extraterrestrials are notorious for probing back doors, but this is a new one on me.
Don’t Bank on It: Hot on the heels of CERT’s suggestion that using Internet Explorer might be hazardous to your PC’s health comes news from readers who tell me their banks have quietly dropped support for non-Microsoft browsers. The moneychangers apparently decided that if you want to check your account balance, it’s IE’s way or the highway. Here’s a recipe for disaster: Take sensitive financial information, mix it with insecure software, and stir.
Outfoxed? Meanwhile, readers who followed CERT’s advice and switched to Mozilla Firefox say they’re mysteriously unable to search Microsoft’s support knowledge base or use Windows Update. So to patch the world’s most porous operating system, you must use the holiest of browsers. And if you’re really good, you can finish before Download.Ject infects your system.
Resistance Is Futile: “We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security.” So sayeth Locutus of Ballmer, in his annual letter to Microsoft employees. I think the aliens have already landed — only on their way to Area 51, they got lost and wound up in Redmond instead.
Notes from the field by Robert X. Cringely, Infoworld July 19, 2004