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Adobe patches Flash Player to close new vulnerabilities
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MacNN Staff
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Adobe has updated Flash to version 18.0.0.203 for Windows and Mac in an effort to close yet another batch of security flaws. While no active use of the exploits had been discovered, the company had been notified earlier this week that some of the exploits had been discovered to be known by Hacking Team, a group of commercial security attackers that has sold such secrets and flaws to government agencies around the world. The update comes on the heels of one issued in late June to deal with a critical flaw that was being actively exploited by a Chinese group in an effort to steal intellectual property from foreign companies. Apple routinely disables older versions of Flash in order to prevent users who are slow or unable to update to the latest version from being exploited.
Adobe's updates for Flash Player generally extend no further back than OS X 10.6, and so any machines running older versions of OS X are advised to disable Flash functionality entirely if it is not already disabled. Windows systems running XP and earlier are also advised to disable Flash if it cannot be updated to the latest version.
A separate group of "white hat" hackers recently attacked Hacking Team's own systems and uncovered data on exploits discovered and used by group. The flaws addressed in this latest Flash update were discovered by security researcher Brian Krebs. The Linux version of the update brings Flash Player to v11.2.202.481.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: State of WA
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Offline
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When is this crappy technology going to die?
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Senior User
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Too F'ing Cold, USA
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When people stop using it.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Too many Web Developers still using this POS. So it's not going to die anytime soon.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: California
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You know, Flash really confuses me. It's been around for coming up on 20 years.
These days, I'd be comfortable saying that 99% of its real-world use is streaming video and simple animated ads. For those use-cases, there hasn't been a significant new feature added since version 10.1 5 years ago--pretty much all the subsequent updates have been for the Stage3D 3D rendering engine.
Yet after all those years of development, and what should be a stable core of commonly used features, they're *still* fixing literally dozens of critical security flaws on a regular basis. Adobe's own page shows 144 security update releases since version 10, most of which contained fixes for multiple vulnerabilities.
My question is: How is it even possible to make a multimedia runtime and streaming video player that buggy? Seriously. How can you even do that? If the codebase is that much of a catastrophe, for the good of the world at large it seems like they would have just stopped development and rewritten a compatible runtime from scratch at this point.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Maitland, FL
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I concur, Makosuke. The only explanation I can think of is that they'd have to call it "Flash 2" to preserve the brand value, to which everyone (well at least myself) would append the term "Electric Boogaloo" to it.
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Charles Martin
MacNN Editor
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jun 2004
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Never been a fan of any of adobe's products, but the flash-based play works much better for me on youtube and other sites than the html5 video player, especially seeking beyond the downloaded portion of the video.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Prescott, AZ
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I've had better luck with HTML5 videos.
This last update is now taking up over 100% of a CPU to watch FX network channels live for me. On at least two different machines. It really gums up the mini, choppy video and spinning beach balls.
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