It’s a well-known fact that before Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s self-developed browser had quite an established reputation for being both insecure, with many bugs and vulnerabilities; and for being very flippant on HTML standards and breaking websites that, under official HTML guidelines, should work perfectly on all browsers (and usually did, on everything EXCEPT IE). However, since IE8 Microsoft has upped its game; and every Internet Explorer version since has been improving both in terms of standards-compliance and security.

Unfortunately, in the attempt to secure the browser, one of the fixes in recent Windows Internet Explorer versions removed the ability to use ActiveX tools within Internet Explorer. For some businesses, this is unacceptable, because developers in the last decade often developed web-based tools such as account management and business productivity tools that these businesses make strong use of, that took advantage of ActiveX – so these tools not only don’t work in other browsers, but now won’t work with modern IE systems either. With many of these businesses having strong reliance on these tools and unable to replace them with a modern version that doesn’t need the legacy baggage, many businesses are forced to stick with old Internet Explorer versions – and usually, the highest they can go is Internet Explorer 7. This means despite all the recent work by Microsoft to improve Internet Explorer, some businesses are still using a version that’s insecure and doesn’t respect internet standards; and web developers still have to adapt their websites accordingly if they plan to let these businesses see their work.

Many of those web developers state that in some cases, just giving those businesses whole new computers would be cheaper than supporting IE7 – software now five releases out of date. Now one business is putting their money on the table to test the theory. NursingJobs.us has determined it is cheaper to buy each customer using IE7 a brand new computer running a “modern” browser rather than making its slick new site IE7 compatible. The company is a recruitment site for nurses and medical employers, based in Microsoft’s home state of Washington; and following a new website launch, the company has told it users they’ll get a better experience using their new site, which has been revamped for mobile and tablets, on modern computers, devices and browsers.

“Some of our clients are still stuck with IE7 so we decided to make a bold offer, one that initially seemed crazy to us but now makes a lot of sense,” says a blog post the site.

“We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7. We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware.”

NursingJobs.us reckons IE7 makes up 1.22 per cent of its traffic.

World of Warcraft is obviously popular, but a new infographic (See Below) reveals that it goes further than that – Azeroth’s population surpasses that of most countries.

Despite its slow decline in active subscribers, World of Warcraft is a pretty darn healthy MMO. Blizzard released an infographic today to celebrate the crossing of a threshold: since its release ten years ago, a whopping 100 million accounts have been created. That includes trial accounts, mind, but there’s no denying it’s an impressive census. In fact, it’s more than twice the entire population of South Korea, as the infographic happily points out.

All in all, Azeroth has a population of about 500 million player characters (an average of five per account, by our math), hailing from 244 countries and territories around the world. 52% of those characters are members of the Alliance, while 47% joined the Horde. Since Pandaren characters start out neutral, there’s also 1% of characters who are still on the fence.

It just goes to show that the glorious Alliance wins because of superior numbers. WOOHOO 😀

World of Warcraft’s economy is still booming as well. Every day sees about 2.8 million trades through the Auction House, which was twice the activity of eBay on Cyber Monday a few years ago. All that trade is handled by just 71 auctioneer NPCs in the game world, who each probably deserve a serious raise.

You can see the full infographic in all its glory over at Battle.net. There’s a lot of big numbers, and they’re well-earned; WoW has been more or less the reigning champion of MMOs for a full decade now. Azeroth still has over 7 million active players as of the last report, and something tells me that its community won’t be leaving it anytime soon.

That is the question Microsoft are now asking all its non-American users, after implementing a new feature that will allow users of Microsoft services who registered as outside the United States to opt to have their data stored only on non-American soil.

Microsoft have become what appears to be the first United States-based company to offer those outside the US the option to store their data off of American soil; and it isn’t too surprising given how vocal they’ve been against lack of user privacy in the United States. They’ve been very unhappy with the revelations given to us thanks to Edward Snowden over the fact that the NSA have been spying on American citizens. They are also unhappy with the fact that their own networks have been used to monitor citizens in countries like Brazil and all over Europe as well. It’s also possible that the move may perhaps have an additional role as a subtle middle-finger to the Syrian Electronic Army, who have repeatedly hacked their American servers in recent months.

So far, Microsoft is the only major company offering explicitly non-US data storage, despite evidence that the NSA has also broken into the private networks of both Google and Yahoo.

While there’s no guarantee the NSA won’t be able to reach servers outside US borders, the move would offer an additional layer of protection, as local law enforcement is likely to respond more aggressively to agents of a foreign country. This of course assumes that Microsoft are serious about their commitment to protect the interests of their customers globally; and not just an act to maintain loyalty with customers outside of the US. There’s also still the unanswered question of what happens when data is transit – data may not be STORED on US servers, but could it still pass through one or more of them when the data is transit – for example, whenever you use a different Microsoft service?

We shall see… soon enough.

Only an hour ago, users in Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and beyond all reported suddenly being unable to access their GMail (or Google Mail) accounts in what appeared to be a widespread outage. Google’s App Status Dashboard was originally unaware of the issue, but at around 7:20pm GMT the service updated to show downtime for GMail and Google+, though further details of the downtime are still unknown.

The error being seen by most users at the moment is a 500 Internal Server Error. These errors, as the name suggests, always tend to be a minor issue on the server (in this case, Google’s) – although it says nothing about what the problem actually is – and are usually temporary. Judging by the response on Twitter, however, the problem is currently affecting a huge number of users both on GMail and Google+. The latter also affects Youtube Comment boxes under the new system now in force there, which means those aren’t loading at all on videos, as well as Hangouts across the web and mobile. GMail users report their issue affects not just web access, but also other clients trying to download GMail via both POP and IMAP.

As of an update released just before this article published here on S.FM, many users state their services have returned; though others still state they are unable to get in; and those who HAVE gotten access to their email back are continuing to report intermittent problems. Nevertheless, it looks likely all issues will be resolved shortly; and we await Google’s response on what happened if any is delivered.

It has to be said, for a service supposedly designed around private communications, SnapChat is looking decidedly bad at protecting people’s privacy. Designed as a tool to keep text and picture communication private by deleting messages from a user’s phone up to ten seconds after it’s viewed, users of SnapChat who value the service for its discreet, secret nature have often found themselves bitten in the ass with privacy-compromising bugs: First was the hack that SnapChat first denied, then later had to admit WAS a problem, whereby all but the last two digits of the phone number of all SnapChat users could be determined. This directly lead to a second problem whereby it was possible for people to determine you had SnapChat installed even if you didn’t know the other party, forcing SnapChat to add a user-enabled “delist” option. That’s without mentioning the controversial “second look” feature, recently added, that will allow one message per day to be viewed a second time at the recipent’s request.

Apparently to try to encourage use of the system by legitimate users – and to curb the use of the service by automated services (“robots”) to send spam to its users – Snapchat recently implemented a new verification system giving a simple test for its users to complete to verify they are human. The system takes the form of a visual identification test – users will be shown a grid of icons, each containing a white shape, some of which will be the iconic “ghost” shape that SnapChat uses in its logo; and just have to select the ones with the “ghost” in.

Now, visual tests to prevent bots are nothing new – Microsoft’s own KittenAuth system is another such example. KittenAuth combines pictures of cats with those of dogs and other furry animals; and asks users to simply pick out all the cats from a randomly-generated selection. The reason KittenAuth works, but SnapChat’s “Human Test” doesn’t, is cats have hundreds of breeds and thousands of colour variations, leading to a whole variety of different looks. We humans are very good at recognising cats as cats no matter how different they look, but computers are not as intelligent at grouping together similar things when they look very different.

SnapChat’s “Ghost” logo, however, is always a certain shape, size and colour, making it instantly very recognisable and the perfect thing for a “robot” to look for. To prove it, Georgia Institute of Technology student Steven Hickson spent less than 30 minutes and 100 lines of code to create a bot to do just that. Steven’s proof of concept script compares the colour, pattern and distance between points of the white object in each icon on SnapChat’s randomised authentication screen and works out from these which match a “ghost” and which do not, with extremely high accuracy. For the more technically minded, an detailed explanation of the bot and its source code can be found on Steven’s Blogspot.

For those of you who prefer a simpler explanation of why this Account Verification is just another example of SnapChat not even trying: Pattern Recognition is a function of computing that has been possible now for many years, even decades; and is used for such things as working out the sounds to be made when a piece of music is played on a CD or MP3 file, to creating 3D models that can be used in architectural designs or sent to a 3D printer to make toys, tools and even food out of. As for colours, even popular artwork creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP have a “Select by Colour” option that can pick out parts of an image with the same or similar colour as what it’s told to look for. So when a system designed to fool computers and let in humans can fail by the most simplest of computing abilities today… one has to wonder whether SnapChat give a damn about keeping their service secure and keeping spam out at all; and every user should question their faith in such a company who are quickly building up a sizeable list of negligent practices.