Seattle programmer Fred McLain isn't making any friends in Redmond. To reveal the security flaws of Microsoft's ActiveX, he wrote Exploder. Posted to his Web site, the applet shut down the PC of any Internet Explorer user who visited the page.McLain registered his applet with VeriSign, a company that issues digital signatures for ActiveX. And when the company got wind of Exploder, it canceled his digital ID. Exploder still runs but now informs that it has not been registered and gives them the option to cancel the download. Microsoft says this kind of accountability will keep ActiveX authors in line.McLain says that he wanted to get caught: after all, he was trying to expose the dangers of the technology. A truly malicious coder could write an applet that pretends to be something innocuous - a tank war game, for example - while it scans your hard disk for confidential documents and emails what it finds to Argentina.
ELECTRIC WORD
X Marks the Spot
