While blaming problems on softwrare seems a little easy, I agree in this case.
First of all, why is windows STILL after years preconfigured with extensions turned _off_? People tend to get to know extensions anyway, they know about exe and jpg and gif. If extensions are usually of, it's a lot easier to trick them into opening "nice_holiday_pic.jpg" than opening "nice_holiday_pic.jpg.exe". That in addition to the possibility to start executables right from the email client makes this software really dangerous. While directly opening attachments might be ok for documents, it should not at all be possible. Executables should always have to be saved to disk first.
The same is true for browsers. All those nice ActiveX controlls that install after clicking ok enable powerful web applications. But how do you tell people not knowing that much, that for us well known plugins of well known vendors are ok, but most other stuff isn't? One single mistake and you might be the victim of a very costly dialer experience.
In both cases, the final step was done by the enduser not being careful or knowledgable enough but it could have been easily prevented by microsoft just making their apps that are nearly everywhere a tiny little bit more secure.
I think Microsoft get's way too little blame for this, especially since those design flaws already caused massive worldwide problems more than once.
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Re:Blaming Outlook
Posted by: dazk on June 24, 2003 08:45 AMFirst of all, why is windows STILL after years preconfigured with extensions turned _off_? People tend to get to know extensions anyway, they know about exe and jpg and gif. If extensions are usually of, it's a lot easier to trick them into opening "nice_holiday_pic.jpg" than opening "nice_holiday_pic.jpg.exe". That in addition to the possibility to start executables right from the email client makes this software really dangerous. While directly opening attachments might be ok for documents, it should not at all be possible. Executables should always have to be saved to disk first.
The same is true for browsers. All those nice ActiveX controlls that install after clicking ok enable powerful web applications. But how do you tell people not knowing that much, that for us well known plugins of well known vendors are ok, but most other stuff isn't? One single mistake and you might be the victim of a very costly dialer experience.
In both cases, the final step was done by the enduser not being careful or knowledgable enough but it could have been easily prevented by microsoft just making their apps that are nearly everywhere a tiny little bit more secure.
I think Microsoft get's way too little blame for this, especially since those design flaws already caused massive worldwide problems more than once.
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