This sort of quote reuse is actually typical for the nation's news services. I shouldn't be surprised. Nobody asked why today's computers are so brittle that a single bug could leave a Web surfer wide open to attack. Nobody made the connection between this bug in Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Microsoft goes to great pains to make sure that security-critical bugs like this don't slip into its applications, and yet this one did. This is a problem that Java applets simply don't have, because they run within the restricted sandbox environment.
Nobody seems to be looking to the future.
We're building a wired world, but all those wires are crossed. We've had a lot of warnings. Pretty soon, we're going to start having disasters. It's time we started looking harder at the threats. Talk back to Simson Garfinkel in his column's Threads .