On February 26, Adobe announced version 11.6.602.171 of the Flash player. As usual, Adobe says: “These updates address vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” The technical details are available in Adobe Security Bulletin APSB13-08.
Microsoft simultaneously announced a Flash update for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8, which will be delivered via Windows Update.
Google will no doubt release a new version of Chrome that includes the Flash updates in the next day or so.
Anyone who uses Flash in their web browser should install the appropriate update as soon as possible. That includes anyone who uses Youtube. So basically just about everyone.
Windows 7 users with autoupdate enabled will be upgraded to IE10 in the coming weeks. Currently, the new version doesn’t appear in Windows Update, but that will also change in the near future.
IE10 is much the same as IE9, but includes Javascript performance improvements, integrated spell-checking/correcting and better adherence to web standards like CSS3.
Oh no, not again! Adam Gowdiak of the Security Explorations research team has been hard at work, looking for holes in the latest Java (7u15). Here’s a quote from Mr. Gowdiak’s alert email:
We had yet another look into Oracle’s Java SE 7 software that was released by the company on Feb 19, 2013. As a result, we have discovered two new security issues (numbered 54 and 55), which when combined together can be successfully used to gain a complete Java security sandbox bypass in the environment of Java SE 7 Update 15 (1.7.0_15-b03).
Gowdiak has submitted his findings to Java’s developers, but there has been no official confirmation from Oracle/Sun as yet. Still, I’m cautioning Java users – especially those of us who have Java enabled in our web browsers – to exercise extreme caution, and flagging Java 7u15 as possibly vulnerable.
No mention of Java is made in the announcement linked above, but presumably the most recent Java security fixes found their way into this Chrome release.
As expected, Adobe has announced updates for its Reader and Acrobat software to address recently-revealed security vulnerabilities. The full technical details are available in the related security bulletin.
Until Office 2013, it’s been possible to transfer the software from one computer to another, and to re-install it on an upgraded computer. Microsoft even allowed people who used Office at work to install and use it on their home computers as well. This sort of realistic flexibility made it a lot easier to justify the rather hefty price tag for Office.
Unfortunately, with Office 2012, one set of Office media will be wedded to one particular computer forever. Non-transferable; one computer only.
As Peter Bright rightly points out in the post linked above, this penalizes a particular segment of computer users: the enthusiast. This includes a lot of the people who write about software and computers, so Microsoft can expect a lot more public backlash against this decision, as well as a general increase in the move away from MS Office toward alternatives like Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, NeoOffice, and Google Docs. Any conceivable increase in revenue stemming from this decision will be outweighed by these losses.
It seems clear that Microsoft is hell bent on driving away enthusiast/hobbyist/power users. Windows 8 is another example of Microsoft’s hostility toward power users.
Oracle/Sun has released Java version 7, update 15. What happened to update 14? Anyway, the new version includes a batch of security and other bugfixes they wanted to release with the last batch, and which were originally scheduled for release today. Confused yet?
Since the new version is all about fixing the rather horrible Java security vulnerabilities that have been revealed in recent weeks, you should go ahead and install the update, if you use Java. If you don’t use it, pat yourself on the back and count yourself lucky.
If you read the announcement linked above, you’ll notice that once again, determining the version being discussed is left as an exercise for the reader, since the version (7u15) is not mentioned anywhere on the page. There are plenty of references to the versions being replaced, which only adds to the confusion. Annoying.
Firefox 19 was released today, with the usual lack of a proper announcement, and a confusing jumble of change information from Mozilla.
Instead of a proper announcement for the new version, all we get is this post announcing a new, built-in PDF viewer.
As usual, the release notes for version 19 are confusing, but at least the new version is mentioned, albeit in an unusual congratulatory note to ‘new Mozillians’ – whatever they are. And, as always, the complete list of changes for version 19 actually includes every bugfix in recent history. When are they going to clean this stuff up, one wonders.
Still, a built-in PDF viewer will allow users to steer clear of at least one buggy piece of Adobe software in the form of a Reader plugin. It remains to be seen whether the new viewer has as many security issues as what it’s replacing.
If you’re running Windows 7, and you haven’t already installed Service Pack 1, you should do so before April 9, 2013. After that date, Microsoft will no longer provide patches for Windows 7 without SP1. That includes security patches.
Microsoft will continue to supply patches for Windows 7 with SP1 until January 14, 2020.
Oracle/Sun has announced that additional security-related updates for Java will be made available on February 19. The emergency updates released on February 1 were originally scheduled to be released with the upcoming updates on February 19. Stay tuned.
Rants and musings on topics of interest. Sometimes about Windows, Linux, security and cool software.
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