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Adobe's head of security yesterday applauded Apple's move to blockoutdated versions of his company's Flash Player. "We welcome today's initiative by Apple to encourage Mac users tostay up-to-date," said Brad Arkin, Adobe's senior director ofsecurity, products and services, in a post to the company's secure engineering blog . Arkin was referring to Wednesday's update of Safari, Apple'sbrowser, that patched four vulnerabilities and instituted a newfeature that pulls out-of-date copies of Flash Player from the system, forcing users who want to view Flash content toupgrade to the current version of the browser plug-in. Safari 5.1.7, which runs on OS X Snow Leopard and Lion, as well ason Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, cripples any copy of Flasholder than 10.1.102.64, which shipped in November 2010. Safari alerts the user, then points him or her to Adobe's downloadsite, where the latest version of Flash Player is available. "A thank you to the security team at Apple for working with us tohelp protect our mutual customers," Arkin added. Arkin's appreciation for Safari's Flash blocking stood in contrastto past disputes between Apple and Adobe over the media player. In 2010, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs trashed Flash as unsuitable for mobile devices because it was slow, drainedbatteries and posed security problems. Weeks earlier, the bickering between the two companies -- sparkedby Apple's decision to ban Flash from its iOS platform, includingthe then-anticipated iPad -- reached new heights when an Adobeevangelist told Apple to "Go screw yourself." One result of the quarrel came in the fall of 2010, when Applestopped bundling Flash Player with OS X. Since then, users have hadto download and install the plug-in on their own. Adobe has been putting more effort into keeping Flash up to date,work that Arkin considered critical to protecting users from theregular exploits, many of them used to target individuals inhigh-profile industries like defense, that appear in the wild. "The vast majority of users who ever encountered a security problemusing Adobe products were attacked via a known vulnerability thatwas patched in more recent versions of the software," Arkinasserted. "This is why we've invested so much in the AdobeReader/Acrobat update mechanism introduced in 2010, and morerecently in the Flash Player background updater delivered inMarch." As Arkin said, Flash Player 11.2 on Windows silently updates thesoftware; a Mac version with the same functionality is now in beta , with a planned final code release between now and June 30. Adobe has also "sandboxed" Flash Player in Chrome on Windows, andhas released a preview of a sandboxed plug-in for Mozilla's Firefox , also on Windows. The company has no intention of sandboxing thebrowser plug-in for OS X's Safari, however. Mac users who want to test drive Flash Player 11.3 , the version with silent updating, can download it from Adobe'swebsite. Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsersand general technology breaking news for Computerworld. FollowGregg on Twitter at @gkeizer , on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is. See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com . Read more about security in Computerworld's Security Topic Center. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Boom Barrier Gate Manufacturer , Tripod Turnstile Gate for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Automatic Barrier Gate.
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