From The Front End - ZDNet Edition
My ZDNet version of my blog. Will feature news my mad opinions and relevant posts or partial quotes from my blog - http://www.fromthefrontend.co.uk
Topics: Wed Standards, Tools and Services for Designers, Photography and graphics, Accessibility and other Front-End Webdesign related info.
Friday 25 July 2008, 5:01 PM
IE8 puts dim wits ahead of tech savvy
Why would they do this? I suspect they are doing this to assist dim wits that get caught out by phishing scams. They get sent a mail saying they have to update their account details or some other random reason for them to login to their bank or paypal online account. They are then given a link to the attackers website and although it looks similar to the site they expect to see it is all fake and a way of getting hold of their login details. To help trick people many register domains like "uklogin.com" and then use subdomain "natwest" or "paypal" so the url looks like http://paypal.uklogin.com and the naive user assumes they are on the official site. By hiding the subdomain Microsoft it seems are making it more obvious to users what the true domain for the site they are using is.
Why are they ruining the subdomain to help the dim wits? They already have phishing filters and this fix will affect legitimate sites not just scammers.
I hope this is one of the features that doesn't make it past beta.
PreviousComments on this post
Very interesting information, David. I too hope this doesn't make it into the final version. It will break a LOT of things if it does. Unfortunately, Microsoft has a long history of breaking a lot of other people's things, whether accidentally or not. So the more this is publicized the better, in hopes that it generates sufficient backlash to get it removed.
So...surely this will push more people in the direction of firefox, won't it ? This is intruiging indeed. What do MS gain by behaving in this way. From where I'm standing, the default behaviour of this company seems to cause a lot of upset!!
Does anyone think it possible that there are other agendas here? Is it also possible, that this is an attempt to stamp some kind of control onto
the internet?
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