Penn State Tells Students To Ditch IE

Hoyceman writes "About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert 'because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities.' InformationWeek is carrying the story."

Now the question is...

[I_am_Rambi]

Will this ITS department support issues with other browsers. Each browser has its quirks, and work arounds for certain things. If they recommend using other browsers, they must be able to support them, especially if they run proxies.

People still use IE?

[ghettoboy22]

I ditched it as soon as I discovered Camino (fka Chimera).

Good move!

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

I wish more colleges had IT departments that made decisions like this. At the major state university that I go to, the university website and everything in it are designed to be browsed via IE. It's quite annoying when I have to close Firefox and use a slow, buggy, adware- and virus-vulnerable browser just to, say, look at courses when I'm scheduling for the next semester.

Kudos to Penn State for not falling into the "it's built into the OS so we'll use it as a standard!" trap.

Re:People still use IE?

[Phroggy]

I ditched it as soon as I discovered Camino (fka Chimera).

Of course people don't still use IE on Mac OS X, because everyone knows it sucks ass. That has nothing to do with millions of Windows users who DON'T know any better.

Any guesses what Microsoft's response will be?

[Infonaut]

1) They'll pretend it didn't happen

2) They'll sue

3) They'll go on a charm offensive

4) They'll spin the virtues of Longhorn

5) They'll talk about IE's innovative approach to browsing

Others...?

security through obscurity

[Dink Paisy]

I consider this article [slashdot.org] to be firm proof that alternate browsers are a form of security through obscurity. Not that that is a bad thing if it works, and in this case it is clear that IE is being targeted more than its alternatives.

But make sure that your alternate browser it is a recent version of Firefox or Mozilla. They have responded very quickly to security issues, and are being proactive about security, much more so than the the people behind Konqueror or Opera. Also, keep your alternate browser patched just as vigilantly as you would Internet Explorer. As the popularity increases you will see more attacks against Mozilla based browsers.

I don't know what the answer to security is. I hope it isn't educating users, because that just plain doesn't work for most people. The problem is that right now there doesn't seem to be any other way.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Publicity stunt

[KalvinB]

The college of ed at a major state university where a certain couple famous people recently debated, where I used to work only uses IE on their systems. They also used Windows 98 until recently (now they use XP). During the hay day of blaster and myDoom and whatnot guess which department was the least affected by it all? The College of Ed. Even with all our Win98 boxes being directly on the wire. Even our division of teachers was the least affected. There were a few that turned off automatic update like we told them not to and those were the ones that got it.

Guess who was most affected by the worms? The engineering department which requires logging onto the domain with your student ID and who run Windows 2000.

The College of Ed tech support people actually did their job and that prevented a lot of problems. So the fact that the IT people of Penn State are sending out a warning to 80,000 students just makes me laugh.

Our wonderful IT deparment can't even keep the network running reliably during heavy usage times such as pre-registration week and when grades come out.

IE and Windows aren't the problem.

Sending out a rediculous warning e-mail isn't going to do anything for them or the open source movement. People keep telling me the sky is falling and I've yet to see it actually happen to my systems.

A better solution would be to educate the students on where to get the free VirusScan software from the university and how to keep it up to date along with their Windows system.

It doesn't matter what browser you're using. It needs to be kept up to date.

Re:security through obscurity

[The Cisco Kid]

The point isnt to replace an all-MS/IE enviroment with an all-Mozilla environment - the point is for there to be a healthy ecosystem of browsers, so that there will no longer be one homogenous set of systems all vulnerable to the same attacks.

Hasn't firefox et al reached...

[eeg3]

...the level of prosperity where it's not shocking when people or organizations ditch IE for it? Firefox is the obvious better choice, this shouldn't be 'news'.

Re:Any guesses what Microsoft's response will be?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.

At this point, Microsoft needs to pay for market share and mindshare. IE can't compete at its current price (free/bundled), so they'll lower it.

the headline should be "From the Big Frikken

[EllynGeek]

Department of Duh." Sheesh. Windoze lusers have to be most impervious people on earth. How many times do their systems have to get compromised before they dimly ponder alternatives? Infinity -1, apparently.

Re:safari?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE for Mac is no longer being developed at all. All current known bugs and exploits, as well as any yet to be found, will never be fixed. No new features will ever be added.

If you still use IE for Mac, switch for god's sake! Safari, Firefox, whatever. Just about any browser you can think of is a better choice, now more than ever.

But it's fixable.

[ulatekh]

Will this ITS department support issues with other browsers. Each browser has its quirks, and work arounds for certain things.

But Firefox, being open-source, can be fixed so as to eliminate the need for workarounds. The IT department can coordinate with the project developers and find solutions. Something closed-source doesn't do nearly as well.

As annoyed as I am with Microsoft in general, if they would make the Windows XP source code shared-source, I'd track down and fix bugs I found. I wouldn't mind. I'd be Microsoft's biggest fan if their stuff would just work worth a crap.

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[poofyhairguy82]

How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?

You are dealing with a Windows admin. For many of them, the common reason for everything is that the problem is someone else's fault. That someone else being a combination of Microsoft, Firefox, Winamp, the computer's mood that day, some virus, "an act of God," or hackers that don't really exist. Don't take it personally.

A good start...

[Mori Chu]

Most college admins' time is spent dealing with student spyware. IE is a big source of it (though not the only one). Something's got to give. I think it's a great idea to recommend installing Firefox and to lock out machines with spyware run amok. I'd think that mandating Ad-Aware and/or SpyBot would be an even bigger help. I don't know the feasibility, but if they could force any connecting machine to identify itself as having SP2 installed, that by itself would be a huge start. They just don't have the time to deal with unprotected machines.

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[johnnybaluba]

Then you should have a look at portable firefox: http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/ [johnhaller.com] or here http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org] (within the next week)

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[Vellmont]

How is it they let people become the network administrator for an entire technical college, a college that hands out degrees in technical fields, that are just that ignorant.

Because technical colleges are a joke as far as technology degrees are concerned. They also probbably pay jack shit to a network administrator, so they wind up with people who believe in computer voodoo. i.e. "it must have been that mysterious fire-fox and win-amp that those damn kids are all hopped up on these days." Remember, to anyone non-technical it's often hard to tell the difference between a good network administrator and a bad network administrator.

Re:Publicity stunt

[J. T. MacLeod]

IT staff doing their job will both recommend the safest path as well as try to prevent damage. It's wonderful that the university took such steps, but to say that IE isn't the problem is very, very incorrect.

I see PCs all the time which have IE up to date as well as have up to date anti-virus software that are *still* plagued with problems. Why? IE vulnerabilities.

Even for a patched system, IE presents a vulnerability for computers that are used for "general" web surfing. Firefox is a perfectly valid recommendation, even for those with up-to-date systems.

Re:the headline should be "From the Big Frikken

[linguae]

Most Windows users don't know anything about the alternatives. Remember that the majority Windows users are very uneducated about computers other than knowing how to move a mouse and click stuff. Microsoft and Dell/HP/Gateway/etc. sold millions of these computers because of "ease of use" and because of relatively low cost (compared to, say, a Macintosh; to most of these types of users, they'd buy the $399 Dell or HP over the $799 eMac, even though the eMac is more full-featured and immune to Windows malware), but because MS can't build a secure OS until just a few months ago (IE soldered with the OS shell, give me a break!), the users must suffer. Because of the users' ignorance about computers, they think that these browser vulnerabilities and other insecurities are just part of living in a computerized world. They are also very hidden from alternatives as well, because they simply don't know (these people aren't the ones browsing Slashdot and Kuro5hin every day, or any other tech-related site, so how would they find out about Firefox and *nix from, say, where most casual users browse the most at?).

If only had the competitors put up a better fight against MS 10-15 years ago (Apple with Taligent/Copland, NeXT with NEXTSTEP, IBM with OS/2), then the computing would might be very different.

Support is important.

[twitter]

The students already knew, but they also know that they were going to have lame brained problems if they used an alternate browser. Having the computing department come out and say this is a big boots for them. Staff may also be relieved by this.

Sometimes, thanks to clueless professors, I've needed to use IE. I actually talked to two professors about using standards instead of cheap development tools that foist garbage on their students and would require expensive software and break in a year or two. It was like talking to a brick wall and they could care less. I was polite, and I can only hope that they remember me and think, "hmmm, that guy was right."

Having a University policy in place would be great. The line, "Use a standard browser" would no longer work. More importantly, stuff that does not work with Mozilla or Konqueror would get fixed and that would spare me a few trips to the library.

A policy like that would also be nice for the staff. Morons who think Microsoft is some kind of standard would get the message loud and clear. More importantly, this removes any kind of lingering FUD about the University not "supporting" alternate browsers. I'm sure the IT staff would love it too because they are the ones who get to spend the all nighters and who bear the embarrassment of turning off whole dorms and sections of campus when the next M$ born worm crawls through.

This kind of transition has been happening at my University but slowly. The student log in still has an advertisement for Microsoft software on the first page but all the public kiosks in the Union have been converted to Linux terminals running Mozilla. The continuing security dissaster is finally getting solved with something other than the blame the user game.

It's nice to hear some good news coming from Penn State.

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[Quixote]

Just went to your college's homepage [starkstate.edu], and was quite surprised to see a "homeland security threat condition" graphic on the homepage!

If this is their public face, it most likely means that the place is run by total dicks. You're better off switching to a different school.

Re:Nice!

[aventius]

Penn State's IT department is definitely NOT inept. I was there from 1999-2003 and I was always impressed with their implementations, policies, security, and interest in encouraging new technologies. Hell, all Computer Science grad students are given Apple Powerbooks with VirtualPC and Windows. Penn State was one of the first to give their students free Napster service in order to circumvent the RIAA bullshit. Even as a Mechanical Engineering student, I had access to Windows, Macs, Suns, and Linux boxes. I had FTP-able storage that I could access from Lab computers and from my apartment. They may not be the best, but from comparisons I've made between them and other Tier 1 schools that I've visited or attended, they are above average.

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[bcrowell]

Installing software on the school's machines, regardless of your good intentions, showed really bad judgment.

You also have to realize that although you consider yourself to be more knowledgeable than this admin, there are lots and lots of users who are way, way lower on the scale. At my school, the network admins are currently squabbling with the faculty over an attempt to keep faculty from attaching their own dekstop machines to the campus network. Well, I really don't think the FreeBSD box on my desk is a likely source of infection, but the plain truth is that there are a lot of lusers who just don't have the faintest clue about how to keep their Windows box secure.

Re:Now the question is...

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm taking a classes at San Jose City College. I pointed out to one of my instructors that I was having problems running the javascript code in Firebird, he told me to use either IE or Netscape since the book doesn't cover Firebird and he never heard of it. About a month later he was recommending students to look at Firebird when the trade journals was giving it a lot of press. Go figure.

Re:Funny, I got my account disabled for using Fire

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, there's at least two different ways to measure megabits, which might account for the discrepency. Second, the line might not exactly be 10, it just might have some packet shaper on one end to throttle traffic, your friend might have maxed it out. Third, your friend is a dick for doing this, there are actually people there to learn and not trade files.

Re:About time

[deaddrunk]

Stable maybe, but Word and Access don't invisibly download spyware et al.

Re:Now the question is...

[dmaxwell]

The devs behind Firefox are trying really hard to make a piece of Open Source software that appeals to the masses. The non-technical-adepts don't like software with ten jazillion options in a menu tree. The propellor-heads can handle about:config just fine. They've added the features that even 95% of non-IT types think are essential. If you know what NTLM is then about:config is nothing to complain about.

Re:People still use IE?

[great throwdini]

Part of that is because IE for the Mac is still a good browser. It really isn't as bad as IE for Windows.

No, no it's not.

It's neither as "good" as MSIE (6.x) for Windows, nor a solid browser for Mac (OS X).

OS 9 is another matter, but the stability and utility of MSIE running atop OS X is dreadful. It's less stable, somehow, than the OS 9 version ... and as you point out, its feature set doesn't compare well to at least two common alternatives for OS X: Safari and Firefox.

It's good enough for OS 9, as there aren't (m)any viable or even supported alternatives on that platform, but being the probable best browser for a dead OS isn't much to crow about. A shame that OS 9 users are more or less shackled to it.

For OS X, MSIE is painfully bug-ridden, prone to crashing, and terribly behind-the-times in terms of "Web technologies" and "standards support" (whatever those are). Quite sad, really, given how far ahead it of the pack just a few short years ago.

Is it really news?

[Spy der Mann]

When I was in school, I remember using Netscape 3 to view webpages (after all, we were using Unix).

I'd rather say that universities are going back to their roots. IE was designed for home computers and the Joe User, not for universities.

It's just security through obfuscation

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just security through obfuscation. Those browsers are not unequestionably "more secure" they are just "less targeted".

PSU Security

[ronniej]

I am currently a student at Penn State Altoona that oversees a team of students that fix computers on campus. Myself and another avid read of slashdot having been pushing the movement to get rid of IE long before ITS officialy declared it a threat. All the students I have given FireFox to have thank me graciously and love not having ridiculously amounts of popups.

Penn State takes the network very seriously and has as implemented many network policys. They have search and deactivate probes on the network to determine if a host is infected and secondly they lock the terminals in the dorms to specific MAC addresses. The team is constantly reactivating virus-cleaned computers. The network security could be compared that of government security.

Anti-InternetExplorer is the primary spyware and virus solution.

Re:Perpetual Employment!

[Dirk van der Broek]

I bet you worked a full-time job, walked on the football and basketball teams and played in the band at half time too.

what does it matter how long one stays in school ?