I’m just barely old enough to remember when people used to patch tires rather than just replace them when they had a flat. But you know why people don’t tend to do that anymore? It’s because a patched tire grew ever more likely to have a total blowout. Guess what? It’s not that different with IE (Internet Explorer).

Microsoft is now promising us that they’ll have a patch for the latest IE security hole … real soon now. So what? This problem, while it’s been exploited the most in IE 6, it exists in all modern versions of IE and it can be exploited in every version of Windows from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. And, I’m supposed to trust that Microsoft will ‘patch’ it right this time and that it won’t blow up on me again? I don’t think so.

Since this security hole has shown up, I’d strongly recommend that people drop IE for all uses. I’m not the only one. France and Germany are both telling users to stop using IE. Even Ed Bott, a long time Windows fan and expert, says that, at the very least, you should stop using IE 6.

We were all saying that before the situation got even worse. Since then, the attack code, which had gone public, is being used in attacks on users who wander onto poisoned Web sites.

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