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Despite Apple’s many groundbreaking products, it’s sometimes fair to call the company slow, and now is one of those times when the label may apply. Following in the footsteps of Sun Microsystems, Apple has finally gotten around to releasing a significant number of bug fixes for Java.
We say the label may apply since it’s better to have patches late than not at all, and the best time to complain would have to have been before the patches arrived. Still, the delay was in the neighborhood of half a year, and the bugs were serious.
Gregg Keizer reports, “The separate updates for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) patched 27 and 23 bugs, respectively. Two of the vulnerabilities in Leopard, only one of which was also present in Tiger, are specific to Mac OS, and attackers could use them to execute malicious code.”
Moreover, he continues, “Both of these critical bugs could be triggered by specially-crafted Java applets if the user was tricked into visiting a malicious Web site, Apple noted.”
These facts tend to damage Apple’s reputation on the security front, and don’t do Java a lot of good, either.
At least the situation’s been resolved, though, which is nice for users, and this development appears to put Sun and Apple on equal footing for the moment. Java fans might take the opportunity to ask for faster responses in the future.
Topics: Java, Web Development
