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Apple Usurps Oracle As the Biggest Threat To PC Security
AmiMoJo writes: According to data from Secunia, Apple's software for Windows is now the biggest threat to PC security, surpassing previous long term champion Java. Among U.S. users, some 61 percent of computers detected running QuickTime did not have the latest version. With iTunes, 47 percent of the installations were outdated versions. There were 18 vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime 7 at the time of the study. Oracle has now fallen/risen to 2nd place, followed by Adobe. All three vendors bundle automatic updater utilities with their software, but users seem to be declining new versions. Update fatigue, perhaps?
I was so excited when I got my iPhone 4. It's old, I know. Everything worked so well.
Now... itunes has changed so much I can barely use it. It's always losing playlists, stopping play because it sees a cloud icon when the downloaded version is right underneath it, etc. Don't get me started about the hidden File Edit menus. My iphone barely works anymore. Browsers slow, maps is a joke, switching tasks takes a while.
The last thing in the world I want to do is update itunes and IOS. Each time it gets more and more unusable, each time the experience stops 'just working'. I won't upgrade either again. Too scared. Too much time to remake all those playlists. Too worried about the lag from the new OS or insanely strange UI of itunes.
It's too bad we can't just stick with a version that works, but this 'one size fits all' approach isn't working great.
Valid question. I used to install Quicktime... 4? On my Pentium 2 MMX 200mhz computer back in the mid 1990's so I could watch movie trailers on Apple's website in middle school. That's the last time I installed Quicktime that I can remember. I'm honestly curious what purpose it serves today? Is it a web browser plugin or what? I haven't even thought of Quicktime in YEARS.... let alone had a reason to use it...
My understanding is that versions of iTunes prior to 10.5 required Quicktime. Quicktime has always been more than a video player -- it's an entire multimedia framework, with APIs for doing a whole host of multimedia playback, editing, and conversion capabilities. It was the main multimedia framework for Mac OS X up until 10.7 (Lion).
iTunes would have used it for both media playback, as well as for transcoding video from various formats/sizes for various Apple devices (iPhone, AppleTV, etc.). Newer versions no longer require Quicktime so far as I'm aware -- however, this article is about people who aren't keeping their software up-to-date, so it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they're still running older OS's and older versions of iTunes.
Yaz
Plus we're tired of being tricked into accidentally downloading unwanted virusscanners (flash), toolbars (java), and whatever other crap they want to bundle. We are tired of running two dozen automatic update tools at all times, all fighting for internet access and all using memory and CPU time. Sure, it's very little and it mostly ends up in swap anyways - but it adds up. And we are certainly tired of having to deal with that crap every time we boot the machine.
It's a great mystery to me why Windows does not have a unified update service (like Windows Update, but also including tools from 3rd parties). It doesn't even have to go through Microsofts servers - just let programs register their own server with the update service, and then let the update service do updates at times when it is convenient to me.
I've solved at least part of this problem by simply not having QuickTime or Java installed. Flash is installed, but only runs on demand (which is actually far less often than you'd imagine). Windows Update I've shut down after Microsoft started pushing spyware and adware as "important updates". So now I run a risk of "hackers". So far they've proven less of a nuisance than actual vendors...
If the vendor has not managed to produce a properly written, secure, bug free piece of software by the 10th attempt, what faith should one have in the 11th. Software updates have lead to bloat, bug tolerance and laziness. If vendors were required to ship working software, rather than anything they liked, we would have less software, but far less low quality software. Oracle, Apple and Adobe have some amazingly well written code lurking in their products, but it is buried under tons of bloated rubbish that should never have been considered fit to release.
John_Chalisque
The problem is the "updaters", and these only exist because windows doesn't provide a centralised update system for applications to hook into.
You end up with a load of background updater processes wasting resources at all times, so they end up getting turned off.
And because the update process happens in userland, unprivileged users (ie most corporate installs) cannot apply the updates or run the updater.
Most corporate deployments won't update these applications centrally because doing so is a painful process.
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I have to completely agree.
Apple software installs effectively trash your carefully configured machine. How many WTF moments have I had just after a simple update and realise that my personal content has now magically moved. To where? Pictures and Videos I take of the family all of a sudden are assimilated into the Apple sphere. My preferences for video audio, homepage, picture, editing etc all trashed.
And in most case it's damn near impossible to remove. Thus being relegated to un-used software that is slowly dying in a dark corner of the hard-drive.
The problem with iTunes is how often they modify the UI or key functions. At my peak iTunes usage I probably only used it once a month. Every single time there was a new update waiting, and every time I allowed the update it would modify the UI in some non-intuitive way, and it would take an onerous amount of time trying to figure out where they moved a particular command. So eventually I only updated when a particular function stopped working entirely. Honestly, if you have to refactor your UI every time you add a feature, start from scratch and design something more scalable.