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The Sun King gets a licence to gild his ... Gold plummets as Switzerland jumps ship... Stals comes out smelling of rose... Stealing the show with icons of the mode... British investors give SA airship compan... |
This week on the internetby Tanya AcconeWITHOUT question, software giant Microsoft has dominated news on the Net this week. From $1-million-a-day run-ins with the US justice department to a swarm of bugs in its new Web browser, the press has not been positive. In the latest anti-trust case against Microsoft, the justice department alleges the company's planned bundling of IE4 with Windows 98 violates a 1995 court order barring it from anti-competitive practices.
On the upside, Microsoft logged more than a million downloads within 48 hours of release of their fourth generation version of Internet Explorer. But, as many of these users discovered, IE4's habit of hijacking system files can play havoc with your computer. Some of the other bugs identified include a security hole (for which you can download the fix at: ), http://www.microsoft.com/ie/security/problems uninstalling the programme, software conflicts and graphics glitches. Scan the news groups and you will find everything from rave reviews to blistering criticism of the new browser. Rumours about IE4 being Bill Gates's "Big Brother" eye on you, the user, continue to persist. There is some fact behind the fiction, as the browser is able to log a user's viewing while in off-line mode. Users can disable this default feature by turning off the "enable page hit counting" option in the advanced Internet options under "View" on the menu bar. But there has been no substantiation of the suggestions that Microsoft can use IE4 to read user hard drives, identify pirated software on user systems or automatically file datalogs on user browsing habits.
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