Trusted Zone

I listen to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson on the Security Now podcast. Sometimes (?) Steve Gibson is a little over the top but he certainly makes you think. In one episode, they talked about Steve's technique to use Internet Explorer more safely. Leo wrote this up here.

The net of this is to set your Internet Explorer Options so that the Internet Zone (Internet) is set to high security. This stops ActiveX, Java, and Javascript. Then add the sites you trust to use these capabilities to the Trusted Zone.

This sounds well and good but the impact has been pretty disruptive. For example, not running Javascript defeats Maxthon's Super Drag Drop.

But broader than this, I have found that these capabilities are required for a satisfactory experience at so many sites that you end up adding more and more sites to the Trusted Zone.

Here's a list that I started keeping as I had to add and then gave up on:

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/travel/20061210_wheretogo_map.html
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/documents/sunbelt_kerio_personal_firewall_user_guide.pdf (won't load or save)
https://www.yugma.com/index.php (won't load the Flash)
http://www.circuitcity.com
http://circuitcity.shoplocal.com

Oh, on the yugma.com, you have to add https separately from http. You can wildcard second level domains, e.g. http://*.shoplocal.com.

It's been an interesting experiment but I don't think I'm going to stick with it.