[LINK] Legal issues around security [was Question: How do you protect Windows?]

[r.polanskis at uws.edu.au]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, Malcolm Miles wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 17:34:24 +1100, you wrote:
>
> >I certainly hope so. St George has made a change to its Website; so you
> >now get a panel opening up, advising you to change browsers. The choices
> >offered are IE, and Netscape - Mozilla not listed.
>
> Same for my large industry super fund, IE and Netscape Navigator only
> supported. You can't log into their site with Firefox.
>
> I emailed them asking that they look into supporting Firefox but, at
> that time, Firefox was only in beta (0.9) which gave them an out:


Not casting any aspersions on you, Malcolm but this is bollocks.
If the designers stick to browser agnostic code and forgo
ECMAscript/Javascript or whatever they call it these days, then
there is no issue.   SSL works equally well on all platforms
these days and the TLS and so on is a well known resource that is
supported quite well on all client platforms.

Most "design/support" issues usually end up being how well the images
on the web page are presented, not so much to do with the security side.

I am with Australian National Credit Union and their site was recently
redeveloped.  It seems it runs on IIS and although it is very slow
thanks to the static content & images being served up via SSL it
works fine across Mozilla, FireFox and Safari and obviously IE as well.

Most financial institutions have IT teams that are well capable
of producing agnostic SSL pages but choose not to mostly because they
are lazy and have very onerous change management protocols in place
that see any innovations stifled by long periods of testing and
committee based approaches to site design.

In this day and age, there is *no excuse* for not supporting the
complete range of client platforms because, ostensibly, our web designers
have at least 10 years experience in the technology - it's not like
web sites have only been around 18 months or something.   The technology
is now "mature".

> new releases on our site across these two browsers and multiple
> version types is time consuming and introducing new browsers adds
> extra time to our development timeframes)."

Bollocks, I say.


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis		Systems Admin, University of Western Sydney
V1-37, Kingswood Campus		(+61 2) 47 360 291 <r.polanskis at uws.edu.au>
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