News Internet Explorer bug tracks your mouse cursor

Dont use it. Chrome or Firefox for me, but its worrying that they dont intend to patch it.

 

Before I and probably some others go off on an anti IE rant has anyone tested other browsers for this exploit

 

I'm confused as to why Microsoft don't want to patch it. Is it a common occurrence to leave security holes open in software?

 

Microsoft says they have no plan to patch it soon? kind of funny considering what they recently tried against android on twitter.

 

This is pretty much useless without some way to see what the user is looking at onscreen. MS are generally good with security updates and patching this probably isn't worth it.

 

You sufer from a lack of imagination my friend. With a 6x6+1 on-screen keypad it would be fairly trivial to see a code Advertisers would love to see exactly where people are placing their mouse as then they can stick ads right under your nose. And those are just the two examples in the article the more imaginative will probably have even better ideas.

Besides all that if there is a security hole of any shape it should be patched soon after its discovered, it might be a "useless" thing to day but who knows how it will morph. Fit the lock before the horse even realises there is a door.

 

Well the biggest and best do tend to get a few knocks every now and then. I don't foresee a problem here.

 

Maybe because they cant, maybe fixing it will mean disabling some important feature.

Its not good to say your not going to fix a security related bug as that is all most people will take away from it, that M$ isn't worried about peoples security.

 

I'd take it with a pinch of salt as this is not an official Microsoft statement. When they come out and state "they aren't doing anything about it" maybe then believe it but at the moment it's one companies word or a small company trying to gain some exposure?

 

I can just imagine an advert following the cursor around the screen. That would be very annoying, and I too wonder why Microsoft isn't going to patch it?

 

Where did it say above that Microsoft said they weren't going to patch it? I didn't see any statement from Microsoft above or anywhere else.

 

I don't use IE since 2007.

 

I have never know Microsoft to publish details of a bug before they release the update to fix it, normally you get the update and they give details of what that update fixes.

 

I posted about this in software yesterday and nobody seemed to care lol

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=253175

 

I use IE and have recently experienced a temporarily unresponsive mouse on more than one occasion, usually lasts between 3 to 5 seconds. Considering that the mouse is wireless, I first thought it was a battery issue, but after replacing the battery the problem has happened again. If I recall correctly, most of the incidents happened on a very popular news site, formerly known as MSNBC. The plethora of ads on the site and pop-ups that get blocked sometimes crashes the browser and requires IE to try to automatically recover as well.

 

'From what we know now, the underlying issue has more to do with competition between analytics companies than consumer safety or privacy. The only reported active use of this behavior involves competitors to Spider.io providing analytics.'

What was it I said earlier? exactly that

 

Maybe not,

UPDATE 2012-12-14
Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president in charge of Internet Explorer, has issued a statement on the matter. 'We are actively working to adjust this behavior in IE. There are similar capabilities available in other browsers. Analytics firms can expect to do viewpoint detection in IE similarly to how they do this in other browsers,' Hachamovitch claimed.