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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I think someone should write internet worm that upgrades IE on the computers it infects, spreads for after a while then closes hole through which it spreads (so the computer won't get infected again) and then delete itself. The fact that such worm does not exist yet after all years of IE6 suffering might mean that worm writing hackers are assholes.

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I was working on a project to do this, and I had made considerable progress. But when I decided to show it around to "some places" the reaction was overwhelming towards not to do it that I became discouraged and stopped.

Perhaps now the reaction has changed, as you seemed to receive a positive response. Or perhaps this is a selected community.

Many people in this field do not want something like this to become around though because it is such an easy target.

The other problem is many of IE6 are corporations and corporate machines. This will not help them, only other users.

I will re-investigate.

I guess there is no good way to weeding out IE6 from corporate environments. Maybe MS should just revoke their licences to use IE6 and sue them?

It's interesting question in general how to weed harmful piece of software out of ecosystem.

raise a fund to pay the license fee to upgrade everyone still using windows 2000 or less that are indelibly tied to IE 6?

That is disheartening to hear sorrow (wow the name matches). Honestly this just made my eyes glitter with hope that we can finally drop all IE support. Its an internal web-app and some terminals our users use must have IE6 because of compatibility issues with other crummy web apps (upgraded to 7 recently) which means we just need to test in google chrome and Firefox and were almost guaranteed to work in safari and guaranteed to work in actually all major browsers :). Its perfect! God I love google sometimes.

No one legitimate is going to do this because of the legal risks. No one illegitimate is going to do this because it's probably not as profitable as building a botnet.

Alas, it seems that the intersection of "brilliant coders", "criminals", and "philanthropists" is a vanishingly small set.

Do you imply that people who ignore some laws do things only for profit?

No, he didn't.

Nope... Google might pay companies like dell and hp to sneak this baby into pre-installations. Woo. And I am sure there will be a google javascript thingy which detects IE and gives you a message about download this and supporting pages will magically run soooo much faster and look sooo much more awesome.

That's only half the problem. The other part of the problem are the large number of companies that force their employees to use IE6 (or if they're lucky IE7), combined with the large number of in house web apps that only work with those browsers.

You can't convince admins to install IE7 if it breaks IE6 pages, but you can convince them to install Flash. This is an opt-in plug-in on the server side. It seems like there would be far less opposition to installing this by admins if Google packages and markets it correctly.

Those sort of worms tend to cause more problems than they solve. The nimda-counter worm (or something else) comes to mind. The people who need IE6 will revert to IE6 anyway.

I know that such worm could accidentally be harmful. But IE6 is also very harmful. Security issues in IE can attribute for large fraction of infections with malicious software.

Drugs can have side effects in some percentage of treated patients but if they help more than hurt they are still used, especially for diseases where no good treatment is available. Just like in case of IE6.

Probably only small fraction of current IE6 users needs IE6 and would revert to it in case other than reinstalling windows after total system failure and thus involuntarily bringing IE6 back on board.

... Or that most worms are written by Microsoft?

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