Adobe Systems Inc. has yet another patch for you to download and install to fix yet another critical security hole in its ubiquitous Flash Player browser plugin.
Hackers are already onto the exploit, so if you use Adobe Flash Player, you really need to download and apply the patch.
Better yet, though: just stop using Flash Player.
Adobe posted an advisory on Tuesday morning saying that the latest version of Flash (18.0.0.194 on Mac OS X and Windows) fixes the cleverly-named CVE-2015-3113 flaw that is being targeted by hackers in “limited, targeted attacks.”
While Adobe only points to Internet Explorer on Windows 7 and below as well as Firefox on Windows XP as known targets, it urges all users of the Flash Player plugin to update to the latest version.
If you use Chrome on your Mac, Flash Player should automatically update. If it doesn’t, click on the triple bar icon to the upper right of the Chrome window (next to the address bar), choose About Google Chrome and click on the Apply Update button you see there. If you don’t see it, you’re updated already.
For Safari users, you can grab the latest version of Flash Player from this Adobe web page.
Really, though, you might be fine without Flash at all, says security journalist Brian Krebs.
“In lieu of patching Flash Player yet again, it might be worth considering whether you really need to keep Flash Player installed at all,” he writes. “In a happy coincidence, earlier today I published a piece about my experience going a month without having Flash Player installed. The result? I hardly missed it at all.”
Source: Adobe
Via: The Register
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
16 responses to “Dump Flash Player now or spend the rest of your life patching it”
I removed it two weeks ago.
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Spotify web doesn’t work without Flash (the app sucks)
Every time I get a Flash security update (which is often), a vision of Steve Jobs smiling and saying “I told you so” appears in my mind’s eye.
I just gave up and removed it. Safari experience is exponentially improved! The snappiness is crazy. And videos now come in flawless. I am shocked at the improvement.
Can’t. Need it sometimes to watch my gay porn.
I have been Flash free for a while now. Some sites say you need flash, but you just enable the Develop menu and select iPad. It will show you contact just perfect then. I don’t know why sites do this. They should just load the non flash page as default, since they already have it! If the site still doesn’t work (very rare) I give it a pass!
Thank goodness I removed it a week ago. Flash videos were triggering reboots on my Mac. Never gonna miss it.
Sometimes HTML5 runs so slow on YouTube that I have to switch to Flash in order to watch the video.
Thanks for the push. Just removed it from the system.
I use Flash to watch video streaming from Hulu, HBO, Showtime. How do you get around that? (other than using their apps on iOS devices)
Have been flash free for two years. No regrets.
Haven’t had it installed for years.
You need to tell developers to stop using Flash. It is not our choice to use it, it is the requirement of the website you visit. Not to mention HTML5 is not always that great of a solution. YouTube HTML5 works well sometimes, but sometime Flash works so much better. I agree that the patches are becoming more frequent, in fact, almost once a week. Flash really sucks, but it works.
For anyone who need Flash for specific website: open these pages within Chrome instead. Safari and FireFox both use system wide Flash but Chrome does not. Chrome has Flash embedded within application itself, so you can still see Flash content even after you’ve completely dumped Flash from your system.
I’ve remove Flash even before Steve Jobs made his stance.
Dumped.