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Adobe Gets Regular On Security Patches

Posted by timothy on from the can-of-prunes-every-three-months dept.

dasButcher writes "Adobe joins Microsoft and Oracle on regularly scheduled security patch releases. The first set of patches for Acrobat and Reader are scheduled for today, and Adobe will release future patch batches quarterly."

12 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Acrobat Reader is crap by deemen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Good for Adobe, but Acrobat is crap anyways. It takes forever to load up and uses way more system resources than it should. Foxit Reader is what you should be using.

    1. Re:Acrobat Reader is crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Reader might be crap, but Acrobat Professional has only a handful of competitors with equivalent feature sets. And then you can get into programs like Pitstop Pro, which cost twice as much as Acrobat Pro (but are absolutely essential if you need the features for real prepress work).

    2. Re:Acrobat Reader is crap by jonwil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem is all the crap Adobe has shoehorned into the PDF format like JavaScript and all those plugins. If PDF went back to what it should be, a document format with no extra crap, the problems will go away.

      PDF and Acrobat need to go back to a core focus on being a way to represent documents and other things in a way that looks the same no matter what OS, screen resolution or browser you are running and ditch all the extra garbage that has made Acrobat and Acrobat Reader so bloated.

    3. Re:Acrobat Reader is crap by ThrowAwaySociety · · Score: 2, Insightful

      kinkos can print word docs

      Printing a Word doc at Kinkos is like hiring chef Emeril Lagasse to serve you McDonalds food on a silver platter.

      If you're going all the way to Kinkos to print something professionally, you probably want some control over what the output is going to look like. Word gives you none. A Word document can look different on two computers running the same version of Windows and the same version of Word with the same fonts, just because your default printer is different.

    4. Re:Acrobat Reader is crap by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That glorified "doc reader" can do far more than you think, Adobe makes it possible to have a document in a file, with all of the features of a website.

      And that's a good thing... why,again? PDF is supposed to be a portable doc format for predictable, portable printing, not a blasted website.

    5. Re:Acrobat Reader is crap by LordLimecat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      <quote>That glorified "doc reader" can do far more than you think, Adobe makes it possible to have a document in a file, with all of the features of a website.</quote>
      Sounds like something thats a browser's job.  I had always understood PDF's purpose to be creating a "virtually printed" file--basically, how it appears in the reader IS how it will appear when printed.  Why the hell is javascript involved now?  Or is it people about 10 years ago completely forgot the point of a PDF and started using them instead of .docs?

  2. Only quarterly??? by davidwr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Quarterly makes sense for non-security patches but for critical security patches I hope they go "off-cycle."

    For critical security vulnerabilities, I would like a beta patch OR workaround ASAP and a tested patch as soon as practical.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:Only quarterly??? by Drakkenmensch · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Quarterly makes sense for non-security patches but for critical security patches I hope they go "off-cycle."

      Once per quarter is already a huge improvement on their previous schedule of not at all even when thousands of computers were getting infected by virus-ladden rigue PDF files.

    2. Re:Only quarterly??? by Culture20 · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's not a fair characterization. They planned a security update to be released a month later. A MONTH. And they did suggest turning off a feature that never should have existed and is not trivial to turn off remotely.

  3. Too much time. by Deathlizard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Although Quarterly is a start, it should be carried out on a monthly basis or at least have a plan for immediate release if an exploit goes wild.

    Acrobat and Flash are some of the most used Apps second to MS products. They should at least be on par with their patching policy.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
  4. Adobe Gets Regular by andrewd18 · · Score: 3, Funny

    "In light of its age and recent back-end irregularity, Adobe Acrobat Reader has promised to start taking steady doses of Metamucil."

  5. Patching would could be a non-issue... by geekmux · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ah, anyone remember the good ol' days of Adobe, when it was just a fucking reader??

    Sorry if I'm being crass, but a damn PDF reader should not be 100MB worth of installer followed up with 20MB "patches". Damn Adobe v5 installer was 5MB, and guess what? v5 does everything I need it to do, and would likely suffice for 95% of Adobe users who do nothing more than view PDFs.

    Everything else is going low-cal, low-carb, lite and dry, how about a simple PDF reader?