“Microsoft has confirmed that the version of Adobe Flash bundled with Windows XP contains multiple bugs, and urged customers to upgrade to a newer edition of the multimedia player plug-in. In a security advisory issued alongside a one-patch update for the month, Microsoft acknowledged that Flash Player 6 contains numerous vulnerabilities. Flash Player 6 is the version of Adobe’s software that Microsoft includes in Windows XP, even in the copies it continues to sell to computer makers, who offer the eight-year-old operating system on netbooks, laptops and some desktop PCs.”
That’s the first thing that came to my mind after reading this, that and this is years late. Didn’t we know there were vulnerabilities since we all moved up to version 7, and then 8… we hit version 10 and NOW they said it’s time to upgrade.
Unbelievable
And I’m sure Ubuntu LTS, and some flavours of RedHat have similar problems with long support life-cycles. Yes, it’s obvious, but software ages on all platforms, and XP happens to be an 8-year old one still on full support; Ubuntu doesn’t have to deal with anything like that, and they already do a poor job (Firefox updates) with the relatively short LTS releases as it is.
Addendum: I just checked, Ubuntu has only been around since 2004. Imagine Canonical still supporting the first release—just how ancient that is now—and that’s *still* three years newer than XP.
Edited 2010-01-14 00:22 UTC
Why turn this into a platform war?
All the opening post was stating was this upgrade warning should have been stated years before now.
The underlining platform has nothing to do with his point as it wasn’t an OS criticism.
Look at the time-stamp 00:10; I was obviously tired and not reading carefully. I apologise if I missed the point.
Kroc, don’t use timestamps as an out.
1. They are not always accurate to begin with,
2. Just because it was early doesn’t mean you were obviously tired. I’m usually still going strong at that time of the morning
FWIW, to the extent of my knowledge, Red Hat doesn’t include software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux that’s outside of the scope of the update agent, which means that this specific problem — having to notify users that they need to manually update a bit of software that the OS’s update agent can’t reach — would not come up. The same is true of most “normal” Linux distributions.
I believe Red Hat still supports RHEL4, which I’m using, and which is… not eight years old, but nearly five, but is still supported and still receives security updates and patches.
I think the criticism that this warning is about six years to late is valid.
Edited 2010-01-14 20:07 UTC
Yeah, not really sure what the point of this is. If they haven’t updated Flash, they’re probably still rolling with IE6 and little-to-no security updates. If that’s the case, you might as well stick a fork in ’em cuz they’re pretty much done.
Or they’re not on the Internet.
Maybe, but the Internet is on them! 🙂
“Flash Player 6 is the version of Adobe’s software that Microsoft includes in Windows XP, even in the copies it continues to sell to computer makers, who offer the eight-year-old operating system on netbooks, laptops and some desktop PCs.”
I would reason that an operating system is only as old as the latest update. I get the impression they are trying to make it sound like nothing have happened to XP in eight years. I rather say it has matured for eight years. Like wine (no pun intended).