Adobe May Change To Monthly Patch Cycle 76
Posted
by
timothy
from the are-you-on-the-patch? dept.
from the are-you-on-the-patch? dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe, which has been under fire for the security of its flagship products, Flash and Reader, for some time now, may be on the verge of changing its patching process to push fixes out on a monthly schedule, which would coincide with Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday releases. The change would be the second major adjustment to Adobe's patching process in the last year or so. In 2009 the company moved to a scheduled quarterly patch release process in an effort to give its customers a better chance to plan for testing and deployment. That change was generally well-received. Now Adobe may change the schedule again in order to get patches out more quickly. The company is considering releasing its security fixes for Reader on a monthly schedule, the same day that Microsoft releases its patches."
STUPID ACROREAD ICON (Score:5, Insightful)
But will they stop placing that stupid icon on our desktop during every single update?!
Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I won't know whose patch messed up my computer after the update...
Will we still have to REBOOT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats the idea, its called "the blame game" and it cuts down on support costs.
stop using adobe (Score:2, Insightful)
following MS example, do it al the way (Score:1, Insightful)
Hey !! Adobe !, if you insist on following Microsoft's example of distributing crappy software with even more crappier default settings, then please arrange we can update the crap via WSUS as well. your own distribution tools S U C K !
Full installer (Score:3, Insightful)
How about releasing a full installer of the latest revision, instead of this idiocy where we have to download 9.3.0 from their website and then manually tell it to install 9.3.2? It can't be /that/ hard.
Enough with third party update (Score:2, Insightful)
Going to take a little more than that (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe patches are crap in general.
1. They usually take the form of nearly complete product updates, patches 80% of the size of the installed product are common.
2. They currently only rarely issue roll-ups so you end up in the you have to have 9.3.1 base, then install 9.3.2 patch , then install 9.3.3 patch can't jump from 9.3.1 directly to 9.3.3
This sort of stuff drives the guy at my company in change of Adobe software deployments insane. For a new machine install it takes forever as each individual patch is installed by the software deployment system.
Re:Enough with third party update (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't Microsoft put their foot down and ask anybody who want to do update to work with them ?
Oh yea, MS should put their foot down and tell them "if you want your 3rd party program to be installed on customer's computers, you have to go through us. No more 3rd party applications installed unless it is through us or at least done our way". No, that wouldn't perk up the DOJ. And I'm sure that everyone on /. and every other blog would say "yes, that sounds like a good idea".
Once they did that, the thread on /. would have 1000 comments in less than an hour bashing "Teh Micr0$ucks!"
Re:STUPID ACROREAD ICON (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Avoid acrobat reader at all costs (Score:4, Insightful)
You know you suck when your company is playing catchup with Microsoft on security and patching.
Seriously. I don't like to swear much on Slashdot, but I'd like to tell Adobe "fuck you!"
This isn't about an operating system. It isn't even about a productivity suite like Office. It's a reader. Stop patching every damned month and secure the bastard. Right now. One patch and you're done. I do not condone any corporate plan to regularly trickle out tiny fixes here and there when they're discovered because that's Good Enough. It's not good enough.
Adobe needs to change their product plan.
Adobe Reader - views PDFs and that's it
Adobe Reader Pro - views PDFs, has all the scripting and form-filling features that are vulnerable and buggy
Adobe Acrobat - makes PDFs
Strip Reader down to as few features as possible. We know that 99% of what Reader is used for is flat basic text reading. So either make a product that does that and only that, or at least make a MODE where turning on all the other features for X minutes requires a UAC-style prompt.