RE: New Paper: More than 600 million users surf at high risk

Paul Schmehl to Larry Seltzer:

My completely non-scientific, unsupported-by-empirical-evidence answer is
no. It's because people who use Firefox tend to be more aware of security
threats and the need to keep software up to date. It could also be (at
least in part) because Firefox has a built-in, enabled-by-default, update
available warning system.

I would agree with both those reasons and add that FF updates are not
hampered by the disabling of the inbuilt (and often seriously mistrusted)
OS auto-update mechanisms.

I also _suspect_ that a lot of pirated copies of Windows probably have
system updates disabled.


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: New Paper: More than 600 million users surf at high risk
    ... It's because people who use Firefox tend to be more aware of security ... threats and the need to keep software up to date. ... I also _suspect_ that a lot of pirated copies of Windows probably have ... I imagine it's the same in a lot of other companies, if only for lack of time for integration-testing: there may be dozens of IE5.5-only intranet-applications that don't work with IE7 and that may even break after specific security patches have been applied. ...
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