New Year, New Microsoft Flaws

Happy New Year to all from sunny Southern California, where your editor watched his TCU Horned Frogs win the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. There's no segue following that -- we just wanted to mention it. This might not be the last time, either. 

Anyway, with 2011 comes a new year as well as a new version of old news: Microsoft has security flaws. One of them is a bug in image rendering that affects older versions of Windows. The other is one of those sneaky things that Google revealed before Microsoft could patch it.

Yeah, those are a little dodgy, and we're not sure what good Google hopes to spread by ratting out Microsoft other than gaining some sort of competitive advantage of perception for itself. Microsoft says that Google is acting irresponsibly doing this sort of thing and is opening Internet Explorer (which is the target in this case) to attacks that wouldn't happen if people didn't know the flaw existed.

We can't help at this point but side with Microsoft on this issue, although obviously the best-case scenario would be for Microsoft to avoid these flaws in the first place. The real point here, though, is that TCU won the Rose Bowl. Let's not lose sight of that.

Is Google acting irresponsibly by disclosing un-patched Microsoft flaws? Send your thoughts to lpender@rcpmag.com.

Posted by Lee Pender on January 05, 2011 at 11:57 AM