Thursday, April 10, 2008

Security: Flash Updates (and ...)

Adobe has released an upgrade to address security issues in its Flash Player. The latest version, for most versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X is 9.0.124.0.

Visit this page to check your version of Flash. (You almost certainly have some version -- it's how you see virtually all videos in your browser.) There's a link right on that page to get the update. It's easy: quick download, close your browser, double-click the file you just downloaded, restart your browser. If you like to be sure, revisit the same Adobe page to confirm the new version. Takes about a minute, total. Do it right away, because the latest holes have gotten a lot of coverage, having been discovered in a well-publicized contest.

Gory details: Adobe's security advisory page is here. Nathan McFeters, who discovered one of the holes, has more here.

(and ...): Patch Tuesday was two days ago, for all you Windows users. If you don't have Automatic Updates turned on, you know what to do, right? Depending on your version of Windows, you'll get about eight or ten patches. I did the update yesterday -- took about five minutes, no drama. Reboot required, of course.

Even more (and ...): FileZilla recently released version 3.0.9.1, and OpenOffice.org recently released version 2.4. The usual Help -> Check for updates should get you squared away in both cases. Be advised that the OO.o download, even moving from v2.3, is not svelte. It's about 127 MB. On the upside: no talking paper clips included. More info about FileZilla here, more about OO.o here.

2 comments:

Rick said...

You know, I think the Firefox problems I mentioned before were related to this Flash update (i.e. they were Flash problems!). Seems OK now, though...

bjkeefe said...

I had forgotten about that. Was Firefox really misbehaving for all this time? Or did you abandon it until now?

Glad to hear it worked out, though.

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