Apple Posts Security Update 2005-002

thelemmings writes "Today, Apple released Security Update 2005-002 for Mac OS X. It fixes a bug in the Java 1.4.2 implementation where an untrusted applet could gain elevated privileges and potentially execute arbitrary code. Sounds scary."

Comments

Safari Popup Fix

[nuxx]

Also, it appears to contain a tweak to the Safari popup blocker, as it now seems to be blocking the new popunders that everyone has been clamoring about.

This seems like a really good thing to me...

Re:Safari Popup Fix

[caerwyn]

Oooh, a troll! Well, maybe I'll feed it anyway.

Advertisers pay a certain fee to a website. That fee is either flat, or based on a count of click-throughs. If the fee is flat, then my blocking of the popup has no bearing on the website as a whole. If the fee is non-flat, and a large percentage of the website's visiting population objects to popups and uses software (browser or add-on) that blocks such, then the website will suffer and perhaps look for other adversting sources. Either way, I really have no bearing or guilt on the situation. I use the technology at hand to view the content I want. I signed no contract saying I must view pop-up ads- therefore, I don't at all feel bound to do so.

Websites will adapt to the changing pop-up blocking technology, or fail as a result. Either way, it is not my responsibility, as I don't manage the website.

Re:Safari Popup Fix

[the pickle]

Has it fixed the IDN vulnerability yet? 10.3.8 didn't...

p

Re:Safari Popup Fix

[Zhe Mappel]

The Defender of Property blurted:

In other words, it allows you to more effectively steal information and services from those who are kind enough to provide them for free, in exchange asking only for the opportunity to show you an easily ignored advertisement. Spoiled scum like you, with your obnoxiously oversized sense of entitlement, ought to be exiled to the desert, if you ask me. There you can establish your commune or whatever it is you hippies like to do, while we in civilized society will do our best to forget you.

I cannot imagine a more selfish attitude towards the world than that which the teabagging cocksmokers of Slashdot bring to light.

LOL! My good man, can you have reached the ripe age of harrumphing without having seen "The Big Lebowski"? You really owe it to yourself to see David Huddleston's performance as the titular character; it will cure you forever of the urge to use mothballed expressions such as "whatever it is you hippies like to do" and "we in civilized society." Conscious self-parody is one thing, after all, but your sleepwalking has moved me to unexpected sympathy in a way I've not felt since the prez fell off a Segway.

Now, in any case, no one is under any obligation to view ads in any context. Nor should imposition, the sine qua non of advertising, be euphemized as "opportunity." It's your confusion of obedience with duty that has led to your arch and sniveling denigration of your ad-free fellow man. You, sir, are no advertisement for advertisements.

Re:Safari Popup Fix

[jcenters]

I think the key issue here is that pop-ups (unders, overs, etc.) are just plain annoying.

This might be one of the reasons Google is so worshipped on here: They introduced a form of web advertising (Adsense) that is clean, simple, low-bandwidth, relevent, and most of all NOT ANNOYING.

The solution for advertisers is simple: If you want your ads to be seen, don't make the user WANT to block your ads.

Sure, pop-ups and spam might make a good deal of money, but I think it would be better for everyone if advertisers instead tried implementing solutions that don't put them at odds with the customers.

More people will click and buy the products, and the web will be an overall better place.

Re:Safari Popup Fix

[Storlek]

Excellent point; you hit the nail on the head.

Online advertisers are focusing too much on the short-term: get people to see the ad. Banners worked for a while, then everyone started ignoring them, so they went for more annoyingly sized and placed ads, popups, popunders, etc., which caught people's attention for a while. Then ad blockers came along, and suddenly online advertising came to a screeching halt as they tried to figure out how to get around them. Now they have, and look how quickly people are asking how to block the new popups.

Most banner ads are completely useless, and I'm not missing anything by blocking. I don't need faster downloads and more local access numbers, and I don't care that I could win a free iPod by guessing which disembodied head is Britney Spears. Maybe if I had been looking at the homepage of some well-known overpriced dialup ISP, I would have greater than zero chance of caring that some other ISP is cheaper and faster; if I were reading a website about Britney Spears, I might want to get that iPod. Okay, the last one still wouldn't apply, since I already have an iPod, and don't like Britney Spears anyway, but that's beside the point.

Other online advertisers should take a nice long look at AdSense, marvel in its simplicity and usefulness. I've seen online advertising grow up from the moderately tasteful small static banner image to the obnoxious beast that it's become and have never yet had any reason to click on a single one of them until AdSense came along and started providing relevant and interesting ads. In fact, oh-so-long ago, I didn't even know ad banners were clickable. I presume a lot of non-net-savvy people still don't realize it. This is another advantage of using text ads: people look at colored underlined text and equate it with "click this", whereas they see some out-of-place picture and mentally filter it out as irrelevant.

Re:didnt show up in my software update

[imac.usr]

i wasnt ableto get it by the automatic software update on my mac

Are you running the latest Java updates for 10.3? IIRC, it'll only show up if you've installed the Java 1.4.2 update from last year, and it won't come up on 10.2 or lower at all.

Scary? Well...

[JavaRob]

This is an serious bug and an important security update, and I'm not blowing that off... but I gotta live up to my username and point out the other side of the coin.

So what happened is one version of the JVM, on OSX, has an exploitable flaw that still leaves it less dangerous than... well, Active-X, unflawed.

It's not as serious a problem as it looks, also. They can't install a rootkit or anything like that, just because of the way OSX is designed. Say you have a Mac, and browsed to a site hosting a malicious applet (it's not a virus, so you'd have to *go* there to be in danger, and the website creator is obviously easier to trace than a virus writer). That applet could overwrite your documents, and wreak a lot of havoc, but you're not going to get owned. The Mac will prompt you for a password before it lets any software touch the core software (even its own security update!).

So -- yes, get the fix if you've got a mac, but it's not "scary".

I tried it; it works!

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed it, and it works just f$#!@^*NO CARRIER

Java 1.4.2 Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Java 1.4.2 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Java 1.4.2 rig (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to byte-compile a 17 meg file. 20 minutes! At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Java 1.4.1, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Java 1.4.2 machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, HotJava will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my IDE is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Java 1.4.2 machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Java 1.4.2 system that has run faster than its Java 1.4.1 counterpart, despite Java 1.4.2's faster bytecode architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster with Java 1.4.1 than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Java 1.4.2 is a superior virtual machine.

Java 1.4.2 addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Java 1.4.2 over other faster, cheaper, more stable Java environments.

It's more scary then ActiveX

[AnEmbodiedMind]

This is far more scary then ActiveX as Safari will not prompt you to run an applet, it will just run it and then your os x account is compromised. ActiveX on the other hand prompts you before it is run.

This means that someone who knows what they are doing is at more risk on OS X then on Windows.

I'm not claiming that OS X is less secure (I'm running it right now), but this is scary (relatively).

Just miss-type a URL and your compromised.

Re:It's more scary then ActiveX

[GaryPatterson]

... not quite.

Mis-type a URL when the new URL goes to a cleverly written piece of Java designed specifically to hack your OS X and you'll be compromised.

Mis-type the other 99.999999% (+/- 0.0000001% error) of URLs and you'll be fine.

Still, you're correct on the bit about Safari not prompting you to run a Java applet. I think you can turn Java off though (not in front of the iBook right now, can't recall). The update fixes a potentially big hole.

Re:It's more scary then ActiveX

[peragrin]

>>ActiveX on the other hand prompts you before it is run.

Not as default you have to set it to do that.

So they aren't all that different except the Core of OS X will still be safe while Windows just became a spam zombie.

Both will destroy whatever personal data they can get ahold of.

Re:Scary? Well...

[piltdownman84]

Can someone please explain to me something? I'm not trying to be a troll, but why is overwriting my documents/home/user directory seen as something minor?

I always see people claiming that on Linux, OS X, xyz you are safe because your system can't get hurt, only your personal data. I personally care alot more about what is in my user directory than my system. If my system gets hosed I loose maybe an Sunday afternoon installing everything again, but if my user director goes im going to cry. I have several backups of what I have deemed as important data, but thats not everything, maybe half of my data. My mp3 files aren't backed up for example. Much quicker to instal an os, and the maybe 15 apps I use, than to re-rip 400+ cds.

Am I missing something?

Apple Proactive?

[Undefined Parameter]

Is it just me, or does it seem like Apple has a team of people working on *finding* bugs and security holes in OS X? Maybe it's just me, but the first I hear of a greater majority of problems with OS X is when Apple releases an update, which suggests that maybe Apple has something beyond a simple stress-testing beta team.

Or maybe I just need more sleep.

~UP

Re:Apple Proactive?

[commodoresloat]

the first I hear of a greater majority of problems with OS X is when Apple releases an update, which suggests that maybe Apple has something beyond a simple stress-testing beta team.

You seem surprised. That's only because so many other companies have trained us not to expect this. We would not expect less than this from other products; operating systems should be the same. Imagine if cars were sold without crash tests. Security in a commercial OS should undergo constant (and pro-active) testing by the company (you can certainly bet its enemies are doing that). The fact that we don't expect that kind of work, and are surprised when we see it, speaks volumes about the practices of the current leaders of the commercial OS industry.

Re:Apple Proactive?

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft also do this. Part of the problem they have is that once a fix is released, it is relatively easy to diff the original and the fix and find the original flaw. This is why they tend to roll security updates up with other things whenever possible - so it takes more time for a black hat to find the actual security hole. The same thing happens with a lot of open source projects - particularly things like OpenBSD where all code is security audited within the project.

Re:Go Go Apple

[@madeus]

This was fixed more than a month ago in Sun Java. Lame response time, Apple.

A superior implimentation of a Java-like platform was delivered long before Oak, in NeXT's Objective-C. Lame implimentation, Sun.

Mozilla/Camino vulnerable?

[commodoresloat]

Does Mozilla even use Java 1.4? According to this page, you need a special plugin to even use Java 1.4.1 or later on OSX under Mozilla. It's not clear to me whether that still applies to Camino .8.2.

Re:Go Go Apple

[TheRaven64]

I don't think that's entirely fair. OpenStep / Objective-C were cross platform at a source level, but still required a recompile. Depressingly, a dynamic language such as Objective-C would actually benefit more from the kind of optimisations something like the HotPoint VM can make at runtime, so it's a real shame that Sun went the Java route instead of simply creating a bytecode interpreter for Objective-C / OpenStep (which is still a far nicer platform to develop for).

ANOTHER Security Update?

[Anonymous Coward]

geez Apple, it was barely a month since your last update. Not looking so good I gotta say.

I might have to "unswitch" to Windows, they hardly have as many security fixes. It's as rock solid as a Kryptonite lock. -gko

Re:Scary? Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which OS X's user accounts do nothing to prevent.

You misspelled "allow." You also used a sentence fragment. It's a real mess. Here, let me help make your point a little more clear and accurate.

Most malicous websites are not trying to delete your documents or "own" your machine. Their purpose is to turn your computer into a spam relay, which OS X's user accounts do not allow.

That's much better.

Re:Go Go Apple

[Carthag]

I remember finding an amusing post on usenet from 1983 or 1984 discussing the possibilities of Apple adding Objective C libraries to the Macintosh. Took a while, but they did it! :D

Not Just Apple ...

[jlrobins_uncc]

It's a bug which was present in Sun JVMS:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetke y=1-26-57591-1&searchclause=57591

Fixed in J2SE 5, J2SE 1.4.2_06, and J2SE 1.3.1_14.

Re:Link to thread

[geoffspear]

Interesting. I imagine that if C++ had been the one with a $10,000 compiler, everyone today would be using Objective C.