No Patch On Tuesday For Internet Explorer Hole 63
An anonymous reader writes "Right on schedule, Microsoft on Thursday announced its usual advance notification for the upcoming Patch Tuesday. While the company is planning to release seven bulletins (two Critical and five Important) which address 12 vulnerabilities, there is one that is notably missing: a bulletin for the new IE vulnerability discovered on Saturday. For those who didn't see the news on the weekend, criminals started using a new IE security hole to attack Windows computers in targeted attacks. While IE9 and IE10 are not affected, versions IE6, IE7, and IE8 are."
Re:There is a fix (Score:2, Informative)
The difference is, most other companies don't charge you several hundred dollars for an operating system upgrade just to patch important software vulnerabilities. In fact, most other operating system distributors don't even charge a penny for such a basic service.
It is still a supported OS (Score:5, Informative)
MS provides long support lifecycles, 10 years from release minimum and subject to extension, which XP has been. XP will continue to get updates until mid 2014.
I'm sure they intend to fix it, they just haven't gotten the fix tested yet. MS can't just go and bash out a fix and release it and hope nothing goes wrong, they have to regression test their fixes and it is not a fast process.
Microsoft wthout the monopoly (Score:4, Informative)
Even if you take into account every single device running Linux, it's still nothing compared to the number of devices running Windows.
Windows PC is hovering around 1.25 Billion...and shrinking a little bit, Android had hit only 625Million End of last quarter with activations hitting 1.3million daily...the number people are quoting now is 1.5miillion(ignoring the Christmas spikes). Android is expected to pass Windows this year.
Its kind of sad really. At least with Secure boot they can establish a few more years of lock-in, Go out like you came in I say.