Articles about Adobe

The developers of a Web services application environment that leverages the leased computing services of Amazon have reworked their Web functionality to incorporate Adobe's Web language for Flash applications.

In another challenge to the conventional application services model, a nearly five-year-old startup called Coghead, led by former Red Hat executive Paul McNamara, has updated its unique Web application development suite to incorporate Adobe's Flex Web development language.

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Users of Adobe's programs are taking issue with an apparent feature within the company's products that is sending out some type of data to an outside service.

Dan Moren of Uneasy Silence first posted about the apparent data sniffing on Wednesday night. Using a program for Mac OS called Little Snitch, he was able to discover Adobe's hidden practice.

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The publisher plans to follow up the best revenue year in its history with a major push for its Web services development environment, in an effort to shore up Flash's chances against Silverlight.

Adobe Systems Inc. is on a roll. In its quarterly conference call last night to announce record yearly revenues of $3.16 billion, Adobe officials said it plans to make available the commercial release of its emerging AIR Web development environment next year, along with other new products.

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A mere day after Adobe made available a patch for its Reader and Acrobat software that plugs a vulnerability in how that software is leveraged to exploit Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7, technicians at Symantec and elsewhere noticed active exploits in the wild.

"So far we have seen a fair number of emails containing this new Trojan in the wild," wrote Symantec engineer Hon Lau last week. "It is likely that Trojan.Pidief.A has been spammed out in targeted attacks on specific business organizations."

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It ended up not being Adobe's problem to begin with anyway: a vulnerability that enabled JavaScript code within a specifically crafted URL to run unchecked, and launch any executable code. When Petko D. Petkov of GNUCitizen.org discovered the problem, it appeared to have been directly triggered by Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

As it turned out, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 have a little difficulty with parsing filenames that contain percent signs (%). A maliciously crafted URL that points to a PDF file can have XP launch executable code after it launches the reader for the PDF file. While it wasn't Acrobat or Reader that triggered the launch, a fix from Adobe issued today purports to thwart the launch, keeping the system secure.

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Professional photographers are about four times as likely to use Lightroom versus Apple's competing application Aperture, Adobe's Photoshop product manager said Tuesday.

According to data compiled by research firm InfoTrends, Aperture's market share in the segment stands at about 5.5 percent. The rest are using some type of Adobe product: 66.5 percent use the PhotoShop Camera Raw plug-in, and 23.6 percent use Lightroom.

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11:20 am ET October 13, 2007 - Late Friday, Microsoft Director of Security Response Mark Miller confirmed to BetaNews that the vulnerability identified in the company's latest security bulletin is identical to the one discovered by security researcher Petko D. Petkov, and originally attributed to Adobe PDF.

3:10 pm ET October 11, 2007 - Adobe spokesperson John Cristofano confirmed to BetaNews this afternoon that the subject of yesterday's Microsoft security bulletin was indeed the same vulnerability affecting Adobe PDF files in Windows XP. This revelation, coupled with the technical details of the problem described by Microsoft's own security team late yesterday, means that the flaw previously attributed to Adobe software is actually being caused by Microsoft Windows XP in tandem with Internet Explorer 7.

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A Reuters story that made the rounds this afternoon picked up on information first reported by BetaNews three weeks ago, regarding a vulnerability in PDF files rendered in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.

But Reuters' reluctance to mention Windows until paragraph 10 on panel #2 may have been partly responsible today for some security sites reporting that the vulnerability affects Linux and Solaris users as well.

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Confirming a statement made by Petko D. Petkov on his GNUcitizen.org blog over two weeks ago, almost in passing, Adobe has released a security advisory warning of a potential exploitable flaw in its Acrobat and Adobe Reader software. While Petkov has never made the exploit itself public, Adobe's suggested system registry fix suggests a maliciously crafted PDF can be made to send e-mail undetected.

Instructions posted to Adobe's security site tell Acrobat and Adobe Reader users where they should edit a particular entry in the Windows System Registry. That entry contains a list of protocol identifier stubs that PDF files may typically find embedded. There, users will find a long string terminated by zero (REG_SZ), which lists several URI stubs followed by digits evidently denoting how the PDF handler should process them.

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The producer of Buzzword -- possibly a game-changing word processor in the Web services field -- has been acquired by Adobe. In so doing, it rejoins the productivity applications market already in progress, and could very well blow that market wide open.

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based Virtual Ubiquity built Buzzword on Adobe's AIR platform, which uses a mix of AJAX, the Flash layout platform, and the Flex language originally developed for Flash by Macromedia, the standard's former parent. Now Adobe may be exercising its option to fully acquire the development firm reportedly founded using Adobe's seed money, with the aim of taking on Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, and very likely Yahoo in the Web-driven applications space.

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Adobe this morning is building support for its multilingual AIR Web services platform (formerly code-named Apollo) by unveiling a new version of its service-driven Adobe Media Player (AMP) for deployment by some major players, including CBS, Yahoo, and PBS.

"We think that Adobe Media Player is the next generation of media player because it doesn't just play files, and it isn't just a closed, walled garden of content," remarked Deeje Cooley, AMP's product manager, in an interview with BetaNews. "We are really trying to embrace the ecosystem and the open standards that are emerging out on the Internet, such as RSS. By leveraging RSS, we're able to support a wide ranging and ever growing body of video podcast content, so anybody can publish a video podcast and will now be able to make that content available in Adobe Media Player."

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Adobe has taken the wraps off of Photoshop Express: a free, stripped-down version of its signature image editing software that will be available online.

The company first began development of the product early this year, and envisioned it competing with offerings from other companies such as Google's Picasa. It runs within the browser and is completely Flash-based.

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A high-level representative of Adobe told BetaNews late yesterday that "Moviestar," the code-name for the latest upgrade to its Flash Player 9 software, will indeed be capable of playing back H.264-encoded video at modern high-definition: 1920 x 1080.

Mark Randall, Adobe's Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media Organization, also told BetaNews that the newly supported H.264 format will be capable of playing back videos encoded for Apple's QuickTime. H.264 is the video encoding codec currently used in MPEG-4.

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Responding to a swarm of criticism regarding its integration of a prominent button in its Reader and Acrobat software that enables customers to print their .PDF files at a local FedEx Kinko's, Adobe said Thursday it will be removing the option in a software update this October.

Most complaints came from "mom and pop" establishments who do not have a large customer base to begin with and could lose customers due to the convenience factor of the built-in button. Adobe claims it needs some time to remove the feature, which it turns out was an easy decision because the company makes little money from the FedEx deal. A special version of Adobe Reader with the button will be offered from the Kinko's Web site.

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Adobe is facing criticism over its decision to include a prominent button in the software that allows its users to print their .PDF files at a local FedEx Kinko's.

FedEx saw the deal as the way to continue building momentum for its Kinko's unit which it acquired in 2004. Since .PDF has become the business standard for documents, aligning with Adobe seemed like a logical decision. However, some Adobe customers weren't too happy about it.

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