The article says that Bing puts a lot of images into its user interface. I don't want a search engine to do that unless I tell it to do it.The reason is obvious. Image file exploits come up every year that infect computers by putting dodgy values in certain data fields of the binary image file. JPEG, GIF, WMF - those and more have been exploited in the not at all distant past.Microsoft knows it. They had to patch their OS for it. Their Security Response Center posted an article in their blog about it.Heck, the WMF exploit even has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile_vuln ...Here is another Microsoft security bulletin about the dangers of JPEG files for Windows users: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin ...If Microsoft gets these files off other sites, if they do not scan them very carefully for flaws before presenting them, it is possible that a bad field value or something might slip through. They might scale images down before displaying them but that does not rule out the possibility someone who knows that Bing does could still get it to wind up passing a virus via an image file.It is not just Windows. Mac OS X has had issues for at least a couple image file types that required OS patches. Firefox rewrote some of their media image processing when they went from 3.0 to 3.5 series. They fixed bugs in that new implementation as recently as 3.5.4 to solve memory buffer issues.As crazy as it is to say image files are not inherently safe - image files are not inherently safe. One could be invented that was easy to implement in a super safe way but we would not use it today. It would not have enough data compression to make it attractive from a memory footprint and bandwidth consumption standpoint.One of the things I have always loved about Google Adsense ads is no images. I can read the next.This year a lot of malware was spread by tainted image files via advertising. Syndicated ads included on web sites that seemed like innocuous little money earners for the site owners. But they were hosting malware.The ad image spread viruses tend to hit news sites fairly often - the trendy blog based sites and the austere named sites run by corporations your granddaddy used to watch broadcast the TV news or print the daily paper.