Day: August 11, 2015

What’s Your Browser?

by dougpete, posted in Computers

For those of us who live our lives in the Firefox browser, the news of a vulnerability was kind of scary.

Fortunately, Mozilla was very open and transparent about the problem and a fix was quick to be released.  Under Ubuntu, there was an update to the browser and, under Windows, I did the typical Help/About Firefox to have it phone home and see if there was an update.  There was and it was applied.

We hear about security problems with all web browsers.  Today, it was just Firefox’s turn.  The technical reason was interesting to read.  Those darn PDF files.

I was also mindful that Google does its best to try to keep us safe on the web.  The utility What Browser? is a web-based resource that queries your browser to see what it is and what revision.

Phew!

But I looked at the screen for a moment.  Because I was using Windows, look at the options that I have.  In particular, I noticed the new Edge browser logo.  I was curious.  What’s the version on it?  1?  I like being on the ground floor of anything.  Let me fire up that browser and see.

After all, Edge was created from new for Windows 10, right?

Isn’t that interesting?

Any theories?

If you run Windows 10, you know that the Edge browser will allow you to launch Internet Explorer so I did and checked out its revision.

This was a bit of fun but I now have five browsers open.  (I checked out Chrome (44) and Opera (31) as well…)  Oh, and I threw the Vivaldi browser at it – it came back recognized as Google Chrome (40) and recommended I upgrade.

It’s an interesting activity but, as I thought about it, I could also see this as a point of discussion with students.  I just went to a website and, not only did the website know the browser I was using, but it also was able to determine what version I had.  Sure, it’s good to make sure that you’re running the latest and greatest, but what other information could be determined by a malicious webpage author on the other side?

It goes back to the original advice from Mozilla…keep your software up to date and as secure as you can.  You never know what’s out there.  What plan does your school have to keep the browser secure?  What plans do students have for keeping the family computer secure?

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OTR Links 08/11/2015

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.