Installed Snow Leopard? Don’t forget to update Adobe’s [bug infested] Flash
For whatever reason, Apple didn’t include that latest version of Flash, which is dated July 17, 2009, in its initial release of Snow Leopard. Fabulous new features to deliver interactive Web features in exciting new ways? Hardly. Just the latest security patch, one of a dozen so far this year alone.
The Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (what an absurdly self important name that is) has put up a blog post that offers the following tidbit:
The initial release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) includes an earlier version of Adobe Flash Player than what is available from Adobe.com. We recommend all users update to the latest, most secure version of Flash Player (10.0.32.18), which supports Snow Leopard and is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.
Here’s a snarkastic and somewhat informative video from Sophos that’s delivered in Flash format — News flash! Sophos purposely exposes Snow Leopard users to attack! — which takes issue with Apple for not including the latest version of Flash.
As pointed out by Sophos, Adobe has become the “new Microsoft” when it comes to the du jour variety of hacker attack vectors and you really should keep up with the company’s patches — 12 so far in 2009. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Flash isn’t just a Windows problem and sooner or later hackers will take an interest in the Mac and demonstrate, for our own good, an attack vector if for no other reason than to prove that someone could.
Safety sealed for your protection
That said, perhaps what the internet needs are some “health” inspectors that could rate seedy “yup, that’s the clap alright” internet software and plugins, such as Flash. Like some roach infested take out joint, replace Adobe’s “A” rating with a “C,” and shut ‘em down from time to time just to remind folks that no matter how tasty Flash’s delights are you’re always taking risk just by installing it…
What’s your take?
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September 6th, 2009
To be fair to apple this may be necessary and unavoidable. They may need flash player installed and by installing over what ever is there originally they can be sure that everyone with snow leopard has a good flash experience. However, because the development of the OS probably took some time, hey may not have had the ability to upgrade flash in the distro. If you think about it, it takes awhile to publish software. I’d imagine its not easy to change software that has been submitted into production. All in all this is unfortunate, but i don’t think anyone deserves a beating over it by any means.
cheers everyone,
~ROBERT HURST