http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=185300343&cid=CRNBreakingNews

    IE Changes On The Way

    By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb.com
    1:35 PM EDT Tue. Apr. 11, 2006

    Microsoft Corp. will release Tuesday a security update for Internet
    Explorer that will also change how users interact with Web sites.

    Some sites that rely on popular ActiveX controls, such as Apple's
    QuickTime, RealNetworks' RealPlayer, and Adobe's Flash and Acrobat,
    are likely to give users fits.

    The change, which Microsoft has been warning Web site developers about
    since December 2005, was made to abide by a ruling in a patent
    infringement lawsuit Microsoft lost in 2003 to the University of
    California and its startup, Eolas Technologies Inc.

    With the changes rolled out in a mandatory security fix, any IE user
    who downloads and installs Tuesday's security patches -- either
    manually or via an automated system such as Microsoft Update -- will
    likely need to modify how they use those sites which haven't been
    rewritten.

    What should users expect?

    --- By default, IE will now consider embedded ActiveX content as
    inactive. Thus on unmodified sites, ActiveX content will not run. In
    other words, music won't play or a Flash component won't launch.

    --- To activate an interactive ActiveX control, move the mouse over
    the content -- which now will be boxed -- and click on the pop-up tool
    tip dialog.

    --- Alternately, users can press the Tab key until the focus is set on
    the content's box, then press either the spacebar or Enter key to
    activate.

    --- Each control on each page must be manually activated in this way.

    Adobe has posted a short Flash-based demo that shows the activation
    process. (Ironic note: If you're using IE after the Tuesday update has
    been applied, you must active the Flash demo manually.)
                     ___________________________________

    Microsoft has acknowledged that not all Web site developers will have
    modified their pages to account for IE's new behavior -- the easiest
    way for developers to sidestep user activation is to call the ActiveX
    controls via JavaScript -- and so will also release a patch on Tuesday
    to delay the changes.

    "We will create a "compatibility patch" (deployed like a hotfix) that
    allows customers to turn off the change for a limited period of time
    through the June update cycle (2nd Tuesday in June)," wrote Mike Nash,
    Microsoft's head of security, in a blog posting last month.

    The patch will put off the activation requirements until June 13.

    "[This is] to provide time for enterprise customers to resolve
    compatibility issues," added Nash.

-- 
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail:	[log in to unmask]
Tel:	(412) 268-9081


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html