[LINK] Microsoft Australia

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi all,

Microsoft Oz is asking people to switch to their IE version 8 browser .. 

 <www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/16/microsoft_rotten_milk_ie6_upgrade/>

. Microsoft Australia wants you to download IE8 .. IE6 is used by nearly 
18 per cent of web surfers.

According to Microsoft's Oz site, (below) one in eleven Australians will 
fall victim to online fraud this year, losing money or personal data.

Australians lost $36m in Nigerian email scams in 2008, while most victims 
of scams are too embarrassed to tell the police and half too ashamed to 
tall anyone, the world's largest software company said.

Microsoft has flagged up IE8 features missing in IE6 and IE7, features 
designed protect users. These include built-in cross-site script filter, 
anti-malware protection, and domain highlighting.

Fair enough, Microsoft, but you'd do well to target not just individuals 
but companies and governments that cling to IE6.

If Australia is anything like the US and Europe, politicians, branches of 
government and even theoretically forward looking tech giants such as 
Orange continue to use the horribly dated browser internally for their 
operations. 

They remain on IE6 because important applications work with it, and 
moving is seen as taking too much time, money, or effort.

Microsoft also took the opportunity to direct IE6 users away from Firefox 
3, Safari 4, Chrome 2, and the Opera 10 beta, quoting NSS Labs research 
that claimed IE8 caught "socially engineered" malware 85 per cent of the 
time compared to 27 per cent, 21 per cent, seven per cent and one per 
cent for the competition.

That particular swipe comes as Microsoft's share of the browser market 
continues to drift southwards. It dipped below 60 per cent for the first 
time in more than a decade last month, as Firefox holds onto a quarter 
and Chrome continues to explode. That's despite the release of IE8 ...

(And, Microsoft Oz say ..)

 <http://www.microsoft.com/australia/technet/ie8milk/Default.aspx>

When Internet Explorer 6 was launched in 2001, it offered cutting–edge 
security – for the time. 

Since then, the Internet has evolved and the security features of 
Internet Explorer 6 have become outdated.

With state–of–the–art security features, Internet Explorer 8 is designed 
to cope with today's modern cyber crime. 

In fact, research studies prove it. In a study by NSS Labs, Internet 
Explorer 8 caught socially engineered malware 85% of the time, compared 
to Firefox 3's 29%, Safari 4's 29% and Chrome's 17%1.

To keep yourself safe, don't use an out–of–date browser.

--

Cheers,
Stephen