It's all happening at Sun Microsystems.

Having just released the latest JDK - J2SE 5.0 a.k.a. "Tiger" - for which the Source Code is also available on two different licence schemes, Sun are releasing binary snapshots and source code for "Mustang" (6.0) and we're even hearing some murmers about "Dolphin" (7.0)!

Since the first Mustang snapshot of 17 November 2004, we have seen five more, with the most recent (build b16) released on 17 December 2004 containing 8 new features and fixing 33 bugs.

Right now, it's impossible to see what the most exciting features of Mustang and Dolphin will be. The Mustang builds mostly contain bug fixes, but we expect future builds to change the balance towards new features.

We were sad to see the most exciting offering of Tiger - Generics - rather neutered by the fact that the very promising possibility of variants was aired with one Early Access release, then withdrawn with the next. It's true that the concepts of covariance and contravariance require thought, but we felt that the benefits, especially in bringing arrays in line with Collections, were worth the extra effort.

Let's hope the guys at Sun have something really exciting to offer!

What's the problem? To quote the CERT Advisory "The Microsoft Internet Explorer HTML Help ActiveX control is not restricted by the Local Machine Zone Lockdown feature. This can allow an attacker to execute script in the Local Machine Zone."

The danger is that, apparently innocent actions can lead to IE executing an attacker's code: "By convincing a user to perform a drag and drop operation, such as dragging the Internet Explorer scroll bar or selecting text, an attacker could cause arbitrary script to execute in the Local Machine Zone. The full impact of executing script in the Local Machine Zone is unknown at this time. Depending on the patch level of the target machine, it may be possible for the script to download and execute arbitrary code."

The complete story is available as CERT Vulnerability Notice 939688

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