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Access Denied to Internet Explorer
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In order to help make the Internet a better place for everyone this site does not allow access while using the Internet Explorer browser. For a detailed explanation of this policy please read below.
For better security, standards-compliance and innovation it is strongly recommended that you begin using an alternate and standards-compliant browser. One browser that fits these needs nicely is Firefox. Firefox is a modern, free, Open Source and full-featured browser that automatically imports your favorites, cookies, homepage, etc.
Please visit the Firefox website by clicking on the image above, and once you have it (or any other standards-compliant browser) installed as your default browser feel free to come back and visit this site.
If you are still using a Microsoft-based email client as well then it is strongly recommended that you begin using Thunderbird. Thunderbird is another free and Open Source offering from Mozilla.org that was built with security, freedom and stability in mind. It is modern, feature-rich and fast.
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New security holes are discovered in Internet Explorer every few weeks. Although MicroSoft is notified of every issue and the flaws are publicly tracked by several organizations some of these holes have existed since 2002 and their average time to repair a security flaw is unacceptably around 7 months.
These security holes combined with MicroSoft's ActiveX software are the basis of most adware and spyware (malware) infections. Corporations spend billions of dollars and individual users spend countless hours every year simply cleaning up all that junk. It has gotten to be so bad that, rather than fix what cannot be fixed (as MicroSoft's Scott Charney told a Congressional Committee in 2003 - see link below), MicroSoft now offers its own branded spyware cleaner.
These flaws are also responsible for most of the "cookie hacks" and other browser attacks that have occurred over the last few years.
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Despite the Web community's best efforts to encourage MicroSoft to make Internet Explorer standards-compliant it remains non-compliant. The current version still does not properly or fully support transparency in Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RDF Site Summary, a.k.a. RSS), etc. Even the next version of Internet Explorer (7.x) does not include the fixes needed to make Internet Explorer fully standards-compliant.
Additionally, Internet Explorer is coded in a manner in which it tries to "work around" mistakes that web developers make. For example, if a developer makes the mistake of placing one code block inside another block that it doesn't belong in Internet Explorer will, rather than display the code as it is written, make a "supposition" as to what the developer intended to do. This is a common cause of lock-ups and other crashes in Internet Explorer.
This also implicitly promotes scripting and programming mistakes. If a developer that is not aware of the standards that have been established by the (W3C) makes the mistake of testing their work only in Internet Explorer then they never become aware of their shortcomings and any standards-compliant browser (which most browsers except Internet Explorer are) that views that page will see it much differently.
There are other broad issues with standards as well, including Javascript. Sun and Microsoft fought a long legal battle over the use of Java and Javascript in Internet Explorer and the result is that, rather than distribute (at no cost) a non-Microsoft product, Microsoft has written their own "Java Virtual Machine" (JVM) into Windows. The Microsoft JVM is not fully compliant with the true Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and this creates a very tedious and confusing set of issues for Java developers.
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Because Internet Explorer enjoyed market dominance for so long it became lazy. Other than MicroSoft's own limited and proprietary technologies Internet Explorer has not advanced much at all since the late 1990's. Some of the more modern and standardized features that other browsers offer such as tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, highly definable search features, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) receivers (i.e. Live Bookmarks), etc. are all conspicuously missing from Internet Explorer.
Every single iota of MicroSoft's source code - including that of Internet Explorer - is proprietary. This means, among other things, that no one but MicroSoft can fix it or enhance it. Considering their track record with that thus far it is clear that they simply cannot match the security, stability and speed of a browser platform that is built from the ground up as an Open Source project. While MicroSoft has a few dozen compartmentalized programmers in Washington working on Internet Explorer, projects like Firefox have several thousand developers from around the world working on them and sharing all of their code with eachother.
"Showing your work" has proven itself to be the best way there is to find security holes before a product is released to the world. For example, this is the main reason that the Linux operating system has taken the world by storm. Unfortunately, Open Source Software is as foreign an idea to MicroSoft as being a conscientious corporation is. For this reason alone Internet Explorer will probably never be any more secure, standards-compliant nor stable than it is today.
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(in which he gives us MicroSoft's take on security by telling the Committee that, "...it is impossible to eliminate all software vulnerabilities.")
MicroSoft says that Windows and Internet Explorer are "inextricably linked", therefore if Internet Explorer is vulnerable so is its underlying Windows operating system.
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