NY daily news:Adobe Joins Microsoft with 'Patch Tuesday'

Adobe has announced a series of measures to improve security throughout the company's products and practices.

Growing out of a threat landscape that has brought unwelcome attention to Adobe Reader and Acrobat from malicious actors across the Internet, the company months ago began a 3-pronged approach to improving the safety of their software:


3. Adopting the same patch day as Microsoft's is a deliberate policy adopted with the encouragement of customers and it's easy to see why: Customers are geared up on that day to evaluate vulnerabilities and update software. By joining in on the same day they make things easier for their customers. Many companies have snuck in updates on Patch Tuesday before, including Adobe this month, but Adobe is the first company to do so as a policy. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns into a trend.


These goals are all good news for all of us because it's true that PDF has become one of, if not the top attack target on the Internet. The 3 approaches all will help to reduce the attack surface of that target, If I have any advice for them beyond them it would be to guide development in the future in order to increase opportunities for practical mitigation of known vulnerabilities without having to go to the extreme of disabling JavaScript.

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Black Berry and I phone

In addition to these major drawbacks of the iPhone, our venture capitalist cites the following as reasons to prefer the BlackBerry:

* The BlackBerry 8800 possesses GPS, which makes Google Maps much more useful, especially for turn-by-turn directions
* The iPhone lacks basic cut and paste capabilities
* Despite Apple’s reputation for superior user interface design, the BlackBerry possesses keyboard shortcuts that make navigation around and between applications a breeze
* The BlackBerry’s phone quality is better than the iPhone’s
* The Safari browser is certainly more stunning than the BlackBerry’s primitive browser, but the iPhone seems to load even text-only pages more slowly than the BlackBerry over the EDGE network
* The BlackBerry possesses a general contacts application that makes contacting people by any given method more convenient
* The battery runs out faster on the iPhone simply because it is used for more tasks. This makes it less reliable for when one must take the device somewhere overnight without the opportunity to recharge.

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H1N1 feat H5N1

"What the epidemiologists are seeing now with this particular strain of U.N. is that the severity of the disease, the severity of the flu -- how sick you get -- is not stronger than regular seasonal flu," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday as the worldwide number of confirmed cases of swine flu -- technically known as 2009 H1N1 virus -- topped 1,080.

The flu has been blamed for 26 deaths: 25 in Mexico and one in the United States, according to the World Health Organization.

Still, Napolitano noted, the seasonal flu results in "hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations" and roughly 35,000 fatalities each year in the United States. There are still concerns that the virus could return in the fall, in the typical flu season, as a stronger strain.

Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, also known as "bird flu," A(H5N1) or simply H5N1, is a subtype of the Influenza A virus which can cause illness in humans and many other animal species.[1] A bird-adapted strain of H5N1, called HPAI A(H5N1) for "highly pathogenic avian influenza virus of type A of subtype H5N1", is the causative agent of H5N1 flu, commonly known as "avian influenza" or "bird flu". It is enzootic in many bird populations, especially in Southeast Asia. One strain of HPAI A(H5N1) is spreading globally after first appearing in Asia. It is epizootic (an epidemic in nonhumans) and panzootic (affecting animals of many species, especially over a wide area), killing tens of millions of birds and spurring the culling of hundreds of millions of others to stem its spread. Most references to "bird flu" and H5N1 in the popular media refer to this strain.[2]

According to the FAO Avian Influenza Disease Emergency Situation Update, H5N1 pathogenicity is continuing to gradually rise in wild birds in endemic areas but the avian influenza disease situation in farmed birds is being held in check by vaccination. Eleven outbreaks of H5N1 were reported worldwide in June 2008 in five countries (China, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam) compared to 65 outbreaks in June 2006 and 55 in June 2007. The "global HPAI situation can be said to have improved markedly in the first half of 2008 [but] cases of HPAI are still underestimated and underreported in many countries because of limitations in country disease surveillance systems
wikipedia

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