Week in Review: The great IE fix

After the security problems of this week, people may question why anybody would still use Internet Explorer today with the availability of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and even Apple's Safari.

But the bare statistics say that 70 per cent of computers still use IE and, as it is still the choice of many businesses, this isn't very likely to change too much in the near future.

Still, it is very hard to say that IE is any more vulnerable than any other browser.

Firefox and Opera both had to update their browsers due to security issues this week, but IE will always hit the headlines as so many more people still use it at the moment.

One thing to remember is that the new breed of web-based malware affects any browser, and it is only regular patching as well as the use of an anti-virus solution which is the sensible action to take.

So who wants really, really fast broadband? Virgin is going to offer super-speedy broadband for 51 to anybody who wants it.

While many home users might not want to pay that much for such speed, the upgrade should offer all of its customers a better service as 10Mb and 20Mb users will be moved onto a new network, freeing up capacity on the old one.

Now it's up to the other broadband providers to play catch-up, and we'll wait and see whether BT does a good job in rolling out its proposed fibre network.

When you think about graphics chips, you usually thing about high-powered computers running games like the latest version of Call of Duty. However this week we saw how Nvidia's latest GPU's were being used to to hunt aliens as part of the SETI program.

It's incredible how the speed of technology is moving, and behind the headline gadgets there is a whole lot of significant scientific research which is being moved forward by IT. The Large Hadron Collider, although suffering some big problems at the moment, was another one of these.

And finally, Mac and Linux users finally get to use iPlayer. Streaming had been available for a while now, but now it will be possible for people to watch and download content within 30 days of the broadcast. It's in beta now, but the final version should be available next year.