Paypal to block 'unsafe browsers'

**evilfantasy** · #1 18th Apr 2008, 14:52

Quote:

Paypal said it was "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers such as Internet Explorer 4".

Linkage

**thingie2** · #2 19th Apr 2008, 02:55

hmm, good idea that

**spot** · #3 19th Apr 2008, 06:47

Those will be the significant set of users who use very old Pentium 90-133 computers I expect. IE4 runs quite acceptably on them. IE6 and 7 don't run on them at all and neither would Win2000+Firefox at a guess, that gets by on 266MHz/64MB but 133MHz/16MB is a different kettle of fish. What Paypal seem to be saying is that they'll refuse access to all hardware when it reaches its tenth birthday.

Yes, it has to be done, they're just a hazard on the Internet however good they might be for Office work.

Just to see what happened I took some old browsers out onto the Internet. Mosaic crashed even before looking at Google, I think the infrastructure was different enough back then that merely seeing today's packets kill it. Netscape Navigator 3.02 crashed looking at Google but it could see several vanilla sites. They had no idea what was coming, the people who wrote back then, it feels as though it was only later that "if I don't know what it means I'll grit my teeth and ignore it" became the mantra.

**evilfantasy** · #4 19th Apr 2008, 07:41

PayPal may ban Safari for being unsafe (updated)

Link

**dr john** · #5 21st Apr 2008, 15:11

A significant number still use Internet Explorer 4???
They obviously haven't looked at the world-wide usage stats then
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/March/browser.php

I wouldn't call 7160 out of about 10,000,000 significant

**evilfantasy** · #6 21st Apr 2008, 15:39

PayPal: We won't block Safari users

PayPal, the electronic payment service owned by eBay Inc., has denied that it plans to tag Apple Inc.'s Safari as "unsafe" and block it from accessing the site.

"We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple's Safari, from our website," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail late Friday.

PayPal was reacting to reports of a research paper released the week before by Michael Barrett, the firm's chief information security officer, that said the payment service would ban browsers that lacked a way to block known or suspected phishing sites, and didn't support Extended Validation (EV) certificates.

View: Full Article @ ComputerWorld