Network Security Blog

I had a blast at the Microsoft IE7 Beta 2 release party last night.  I listen to a lot of podcasts, all of which are tech-related, but only half of which are security related.  And last night I got to meet half a dozen of the personalities behind  the podcasts I listen to regularly.  Steve Gillmor and Micheal Arrington from the Gillmor Gang, Om Malik, Niall Kennedy and Robert Scoble were all there, as well as my friend, Jeremiah Owyang.  I’ve already covered parts of the experience on the Podcast Roundtable and at ComputerWorld.

My favorite conversation of the night was with Tantek Celik from Technorati.  Tantek asked why we can’t secure a computer, after all, we’ve secured televisions and other devices.   We talked about many of the issues faced on a daily basis in securing a computer, and the consensus was that is simply a matter of complexity; a television is designed to do one thing very well, while a computer is built to do hundreds of things.  Not what you’d call a revolutionary conversation, but one that’s still fun to engage in once in a while.

Talking to the Microsoft product managers and engineers, it sounds like only when used with Vista does IE 7 get it’s full security boost.  There are three security safeguards in Internet Explorer that won’t work in the current beta.  The most significant, at least to me, is that use of a reduced priviledges account only works when used on Vista.  I’d like to see that sooner rather than later, but I’m glad they’re including the safeguard at all.

The folks at Microsoft really wanted to hear what the folks at the dinner had to say, and not just about IE 7.  And they want your feedback.  One of the more important announcements was the free support line Microsoft has created just for IE 7 Beta 2.  Beta 2 is aimed at the enthusiast, and Microsoft is looking to support IE 7’s adoption in any way possible.

I almost forgot.  I took my little iRiver 895 and Jeremiah has put together some of the conversations from last night.  We’ve got more audio, but that’ll come out later.

Podcast: IE7 Beta Launch Party, Discussions with the Product Teams

Technorati Tags: security, Internet Explorer, Microsoft

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