Adobe has taken a lot of heat lately for the (in)security of its two most popular consumer products, Reader and Flash Player. While much of the criticism may be justified, it’s also important to give credit for some positive steps that Brad Arkin and the rest of the Adobe security team are taking to protect consumers.
One such step is the recent release of an improved automatic update mechanism in Reader and Acrobat. The purpose of this new mechanism “is to keep end-users up-to-date in a much more streamlined and automated way,” according to a recent Adobe blog post. Importantly, the new mechanism respects user choice by continuing to observe the update settings that the user previously set (or left at their defaults) in Reader/Acrobat.
In this later blog post, Adobe’s Steve Gottwals points out that the current default setting is “Automatically download updates, but let me choose when to install them,” while the optimal setting for user security is “Automatically install updates.” To Adobe’s credit, they’re exploring ways to encourage users to opt into this more aggressive update setting, but without changing it surreptitiously.
Automatic updates are a wonderful thing, and I encourage everyone to use these as often as they can. These are especially a great help to home users and small business.
Unfortunately previous experience have made users wary of this, since it allows the companies to push any kinds of updates to their systems, and this has previously been abused to push automatical opt ins and other features that the users would normally consider invasive.
But with the latest laws, this misuse has been greatly reduced, and most large corporations (Adobe, Microsoft, Apple e.t.c.) have adopted a more ethic strategy in their automatic update process. This allows for a much wider use of these features and I do recommend most people use the feature.
Of course, large business and individuals that are technically adept, will want to stay in control, and that is perfectly allright, the current automatic update functions allow these individuals and companies to prosper in their own ways.
KUDOS to Adobe and other companies adopting a good strategy in autoupdates to protect consumers and business.
I want to stop badware