Life and Kraya by Stephen Ramsay
Posts tagged Apple
Microsoft Internet Explorer Popularity vote
Mar 1st
Those of you who follow the news may be aware of minor but major changes to Microsoft Internet Explorer.
All Windows 7, Vista and XP users who currently use internet explorer will be offered a choice as part of the deal Microsoft reached with European Commission.
Microsoft IE sits awaiting the worlds judgment, like the American high school cheerleader who’s inexplicable popularity is for the first time being put to the test, as the not so popular kids elect a new leader.
A pop-up window will prompt people to choose and install one of 12 different browsers or let them stick with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Kraya recommends users choose anything but Internet explorer. Users are able to select any browser of their own choosing however we would strongly recommend users pick from our top picks:
Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome
Apple Safari http://www.apple.com/safari/
The big question is will the Anti-trust agreement and the fines totaling 1.68bn euros ($2.44bn, £1.5bn) that have been imposed by the EU on Microsoft make any difference? Take a look at the BBC graphic below, IE has a massive dominance in the browser market in the main due to the sheer ambivalence and ignorance of its users, no one (or very few) choose to use IE it was the default, what they had to use and by the point they had learned that there might be a choose out there with had learned IE, so stuck with it not because it was superior but because its what they know.
Browser market share
Firefox has for some time been catching on IE but it still has a long way to go. Its progress has been at lest in part due to its superiority as a browser over IE. However recent updates have left Firefox slower and buggier than ever before. For a browser that has never been advertised in main stream media, unlike Google Chrome, its rise to control a quarter of the browser market has been purely viral.
Google on the other hand has in anticipation of today’s changes embarked on a massive advertising campaign to push Chrome and gain even more control over the Internet, only time will tell just how successful Google ad spending has made it. The question now is will it be money well spent, or will Google find itself the next target of the EU competition and anti-trust regulators?
Only time will tell as is the case of Microsoft, I for one will be eagerly waiting updated browser market share statistics, as I’m sure Mr Gates will be. However I cant help but feel that we have in no way seen the beginning of the end of IE, undoubtedly its share will slip, I just don’t think the EUs Settlement can break what are now years of ingrained habit and apathy.
Further information:
Adobe update – excessive traffic to ardownload.adobe.com
Dec 16th
Adobe has not been without its problems of late, and whilst there have been security issues that could have lead to losses, so far none of our clients have suffered financially from Adobe’s failings. Until now that is.
One of our Clients had their ADSL cut off this week as they had exceeded the usage policy. Why? Adobe Update Manager on one Windows XP PC had decided to download over 70GB of data over the course of a 7 day period. It would appear that it was getting itself in a loop and just kept trying to update continuously, 70GB worth of continuously.
The Adobe website serves the update MSI binary files as content type Text/Plain, the Adobe Update client has a very short timeout and immediately opens another connection to re-start the download. Hence if there is a slow connection or the caching server does not return the whole file in a timely manner the Adobe Update client enters the infinite loop of retries, causing the excessive bandwidth consumption witnessed here.
There are several forum threads including on Adobe’s own site http://forums.adobe.com/thread/392129 all linking this issue to a conflict between and old version of WebMarshall and Adobe updater; however our machines do not use WebMarshall and we do not have it installed anywhere on our networks.
We do however use Squid caching on our CentOS 5 servers. The server in this instance seems to be fulfilling the requests on each occasion in a timely manner – the issue is that each time Adobe updater passes a URL it is different in key areas, which Squid interprets as a separate request. This is not abnormal and we have seen this before when we have tried to configure squid to cache Windows updates. However rather than enter a loop of requests, Windows updates simply fail. Other automatic updaters work well with caching systems and indeed most ISPs are now implementing different forms of web caching on their own networks. Dose this mean the Adobe issue is affecting them in the same way?
The issue seems to only affect PCs (or at least we have seen no affected Mac users as yet), and it also seems to affect most Adobe products.
For now Adobe and the ISPs have remained quiet on the issue, however we have 3 other clients (and my own home ADSL ) who cannot update Adobe at all, access to ardownload.adobe.com appears to have been blocked by the ISP. Quite when the Adobe update issue will be resolved is unknown; however we have also taken the decision to block access to ardownload.adobe.com from all of our networks, for the moment.
Richard, one of our Systems Admin Team has published a more detailed account of the technicalities involved here: http://richard.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/12/16/a-big-adobe-problem/
Security Bulletin – Adobe Reader and Acrobat
May 14th
Below is an update to Security Bulletin – Adobe – April 09
Adobe have published a new Security Bulletin and provided updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat patches. These updates resolve the previously reported vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 and earlier versions. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1492) would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system remotely and install Malicious code.
We have already recommended that user consider using alternatives to Adobe reader, this continues to be our current advice. However users still using Adobe should now update and install these patches as soon as practical.
Adobe recommends users of Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1 and earlier versions update to Adobe Reader 9.1.1 and Acrobat 9.1.1. Adobe recommends users of Acrobat 8 update to Acrobat 8.1.5, and users of Acrobat 7 update to Acrobat 7.1.2. For Adobe Reader users who can’t update to Adobe Reader 9.1.1, Adobe has provided the Adobe Reader 8.1.5 and Adobe Reader 7.1.2 updates.
Security Bulletin – Adobe – April 09
Apr 29th
Yet more security vulnerabilities have come to light in Adobe Reader. All current versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat (Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1, 8.1.4, and 7.1.1 and earlier versions) are vulnerable to this issue on all platforms (Windows, Apple Macintosh and Unix).
The vulnerabilities affect JavaScript functions and could allow remote code execution. This means that if you opened an infected file which contained JavaScript it could be used to install malicious software on your PC. Proof of Concept has been demonstrated. However to date there has been no attacks utilising these vulnerabilities, it is only a matter of time.
Please also note that anti-virus and anti malware / spyware tools are unlikely to pick this issue up at present.
ACCTION NEEDED;
Disabling JavaScript in Adobe Reader and Acrobat will prevent these vulnerabilities from being exploited, however we also advise that clients consider using another PDF reader such as Foxit. You can download Foxit Reader here – http://www.filehippo.com/download_foxit/
Alternatively turn off JavaScript by using the following instructions:
- Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
- Select Edit>Preferences
- Select the JavaScript Category
- Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
- Click OK
Adobe Reader Javascript (click on Image to enlarge)
