Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Knew of Latest Java 0-Day Security Hole In August
An anonymous reader writes "After news broke on Thursday that a new Java 0-day vulnerability had been discovered, and was already being included in multiple popular exploit kits, two new important tidbits have come in on Friday. Firstly, this whole fiasco could have been avoided if Oracle had properly patched a previous vulnerability. Furthermore, not only is the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, but it is being used to push ransomware." Meanwhile, writes reader Beeftopia, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is getting in on the action, and "has warned users to disable or uninstall Java software on their computers, amid continuing fears and an escalation in warnings from security experts that hundreds of millions of business and consumer users are vulnerable to a serious flaw."
if Oracle knew about it in August
Can we please, please, please stop using the term "0-day"? It's completely meaningless here. Actually, it's worse than meaningless as it's used incorrectly and just makes things confusing. Is it a noun? Is it an adjective? Depends on who's writing the Slashdot headline! Try reading the headline and article while omitting the text "0-day" and you'll see it reads just fine and actually makes sense now.
Dig hard enough and I'm sure you'll find equally arcane .NET setups. Remember, kids: the only difference between Java and .NET is that Java was paved with good intentions.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
java on the web is effectively dead
What killed it?
It's clunky. That's the shortest correct explanation I can provide. The whole user experience is just awful.
The first thing you experience when you encounter a Java applet is a sinking feeling as the browser becomes unresponsive with a large gray void somewhere on the page that will eventually render the applet. Sometimes this is alleviated slightly by a progress indicator in some weird JVM font that looks like it was salvaged from OpenBoot. All this "loading" takes large amounts of RAM so the OS starts paging which creates more anxiety for the user as the drive LED indicates vast amounts of mysterious IO. In any case the process takes too long and by the time the applet has rendered something meaningful most users have lost patience.
At this point the applet has started rendering. Frequently this is a bad thing because many Java applets are tragically ugly. Repulsive, really. So bad they look like hastily made email phishing attempts. It would have been better if the "loading" had never ended leaving the user to seek alternatives. The moment a user sees those fonts they squint, groan a bit inside and consider calling someone for help. The GUI widgets look weird. Things don't work right, like copy and paste or common GUI hot keys. And everything lags; you can feel extra tens of milliseconds of lag with every UI operation; click, scroll, whatever. It all lags.
Finally whatever unfortunate task led our victim here has been accomplished and it's time to leave. You click 'home' or some link or whatever to be on your way and BOOM!, the browser segfaults and closes. Recent browsers mitigate this habit by isolating applets (and other plug-ins) in process sandboxes, but the user still gets that extra little poke in the eye to top off the rest of the 'experience.' The sort of effort required to make the JVM run smoothly inside common browsers has never been applied and to this day it is a fragile and crashy combination.
People that care about the user experience, people with tens or hundreds of millions of users using their site(s), don't tolerate this heinous shit. So Java applets die the death they deserve.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old