Hi, just a public service announcement to remind you that if you use Adobe Flash Player, it is important that you keep up-to-date. Fortunately, the Ubuntu repositories already have the latest security update for 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, and the still-in-development 11.10, so you should already be safe but it doesn’t hurt to check Update Manager to make sure that you’ve installed all your updates. (Remember that you need to restart your web browser to use updated plugins.)
However if you use Windows, you’ll need to update manually. Remember that Adobe has two installers for Windows, one for Internet Explorer & one for all the other web browsers. While you’re at it, be sure to update Adobe Reader if you use it as there’s a security update for that too this week. You should also ensure that that you don’t have any versions of Java older than 6 Update 26 installed in Windows either. I use FileHippo.com’s Update Checker to keep up-to-date since Windows Update doesn’t include third-party software.
I strongly recommend that you not use Adobe’s native 64-bit “Square” Flash plugin either on Windows or Linux. Adobe hasn’t bothered to update their preview release since last November and there have been several critical security updates released since then. Although Windows users are most at risk, these vulnerabilities affect Linux too. I realized today that I was still using a PPA build of this 64-bit plugin and therefore was opening myself up for trouble. I replaced it with the ordinary flashplugin-installer that is in the Ubuntu repositories.
If you go to this page on Adobe’s website, you can verify that you have version 10.3.181.26 or later installed. Android should be using 10.3.181.24 or later.
Mozilla has a handy website you can visit to see if your web browser plugins are up-to-date. You don’t have to be using Firefox to use it as it works for most browsers.
If you’d like more technical information about how important this week’s Flash security update is, check out this post.
That’s OK, but Adobe is failing miserably in providing updates to some platforms (Linux 64bits here!).
According to Adobe, I should have 10.3.181.26 installed… but they don’t provide that version for 64 bits… their latest preview is from Nov 2010.
So my Flash plugin is disabled by default. Adobe Linux support is a joke.
You can use the 32 bit version in 64-bit Linux. Adobe doesn’t really provide a supported 64-bit version anywhere, not even for Windows. But yes, the point of my article is don’t use the native 64-bit version!
[…] June 19, 2011 0050 SGT] Based on the comment from Jeremy to this post, I’m updating the […]
Thanks for reminding about this, I too was still using the outdated 64-bit package from the PPA. Thought I’d already switched back to the official package a while ago but turns out I hadn’t.