Nick Cole

Scotland

Director

Acknowledging and then permitting a download, or script/activex execution is much of the problem. The difficulty is that dialogue only asks "Do you want to run it?" The absence of diagnostic information or explanation of what it is going to do means that we can not make an informed decision. In common with the arcane and meaningless error codes and fault boxes that Microsoft are so fond of.

Critically the problem is caused by the ability for applications to run code. If this was removed then the ability to do anything malicious would be almost eliminated. It is all very well having fancy facilities and complex processes but they all demand the ability to run some form of programming language which interacts with the desktop OS. As long as this persists then malware can never be prevented.

Ultimately we have never been given enough detailed information at the time of being asked the question to allow us to confidently say yes. And if we ask for prompts the number of times we get asked to authorise them is ridiculous. When did anybody in Microsoft count the number of prompts for script through its own download/update or technet websites? 40 or 50 is not unusual. And apart from when data needs to be carried forward through a cookie, these scripts do nothing other than provide fancy graphics.