Windows security... plus Mozilla

Steve Gibson is my hero. Well, after StrongBad anyway. Seriously though.  Apparently the WinXP malformed URL vulnerability is pretty serious... it can delete entire directories from your hard drive.  So Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put off making a patch for the vulnerability until the release of SP1, a few months later.  They claimed that releasing a separate patch immediately would have required "significant technology development."  Steve Gibson wrote a patch in less than a day and put it online.  He’s always on top of these security issues, he calls Microsoft out on their malarkey, and he writes all these cool, tiny programs to fix stuff.  If he told me to put butter on top of my computer and turn it upside down and wipe it on the carpet, I’d do it.  He knows what he’s talking about.

In other news.... you should be browsing the web with Mozilla.  Stop using Internet Explorer.  It’s awful.  It’s full of bugs and security holes.  It displays pages incorrectly and against spec.  And worst of all... it has millions of popups!  Well, at least it allows millions of popups.  Mozilla doesn’t.  It sends that stuff out directly.  I haven’t seen a popup in months, except for the other day when I made the mistake of viewing a page in Internet Explorer and got 3 popups on the first page I went to!  I’ll never go back.  Mozilla forever!

And while I’m showing my support for the underdog, let me just mention Perl.  Maybe Perl isn’t the underdog, but you probably haven’t programmed with it, and you probably should.  Perl will make your life better.  You’ll be happier with yourself.  You’ll sleep better at night.  You can say "Just another perl h4x0r" at the bottom of your emails, and mean it.