Poison Applet Could Wipe Windows PCs

The Register ^ | 10 April 2003 | John Leyden

[Knitebane]

Not true. The security made into Java is such that unauthorized applets cannot write to the hard disk. The only way this can happen is if there is a security hole in the Virtual Machine (as in this case).

You don't know that.

If this were real Java, you would be correct, but this bug is in Microsoft's proprietary implementation of Java, not the Sun or IBM Java, both of which are open and well documented.

Microsoft took the original Java implementation and modified it, and no one outside of Microsoft knows exactly how it interacts with other Windows software.