Activex Technology is one of several key Microsoft Improvements that is backfiring on Microsoft Corporation in this Age Of Malware.
What is ActiveX
A Com Component that is "Internet enabled", slimmed down from the OLE to support "content push". It was a huge success in the battle to wrestle market share from Netscape Navigator's plugin architecture.
As a competitor to Java Language, it may have checked the growing demand for Java because Activex Technology can be delivered through much cheaper mechanisms such as Vb Classic and Active Xscripting. As the market share of Microsoft Windows grew, it made business sense for developers to think first of Activex Technology, further aided by its ability to deliver superior "user experience". The price was platform independence.
It has "built-in" licensing mechanism to allow developers of Activex Technology to benefit from developing ActiveX products. see
And from the vendor archives, see
the article stated the intent to have Activex adopted as international standard.
History of ActiveX
News about Activex Technology
Dec04 discovered flaw helps phishing (a type of Social Engineering) scams even for Windows Xp SP2 machines at
What ActiveX offers, in the form Authenti Code (Digital Signatures for components), is not so much security as accountability. Authenti Code is designed to make it hard to spoof a component's credentials. This permits you to decide whether to download and run a component based on whether you trust the component's creators. Once you've said "yes", an ActiveX component has no restrictions on what it can do.
Resources
This article is from 1997. Just how pertinent is it now at the end of 2004?
Now a liability
see
MS article above was selling the benefits of autodownload, transparent installation at the time of publication.
See original on c2.com 