• Tim the IT Guy

    PDFs now as rock-solid secure as ActiveX

    It's a verified bug: PDF files can be used to take over your PC. Adobe's mistake was adding support for ever-sloppy JavaScript inside the once-benign PDF format. Core Security, the company that outed the vulnerability, says, "An attacker could put malicious code in JavaScript embedded in a PDF and [...] could manipulate the program's memory allocation pattern and trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user." Great. I can hardly wait to reinstall Paul's PC after he pretends to read another of those ethics-in-journalism PDFs.

    12:20 PM on Wed Nov 5 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    321 views, 1 comment

    Latest by macbeach: Sometimes it's good when the open source alternatives to these things don't follow the lead of the products they imitate. more »

  • search engine optimization

    Skip Intro now officially dead

    Google began indexing the text context of Flash animations, movies and interfaces in Web pages a few months ago. But no Google improvement is complete until the professional SEO's document how to game the system. Here's the first well-done guide to getting your world class Flash content the placement it deserves on the Internet. Author Brian Ussery steals one of Google's best tricks: If you're going to tell a bunch of techies how to lie, blanket it in soothing geek imagery by using examples tied to science. NASA is good. Executive summary for globalists: "Google doesn’t seem to translate text content in Flash files, especially when text is supplied by a server or some other third party source." So it's kind of Speak English or Die for now.

    9:20 AM on Tue Oct 14 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    319 views, 1 comment

    Latest by nevermind_y: So what's the big deal? Yahoo's video search has been indexing flash content since ages now. Oh I forgot. Yahoo more »

  • iphone

    Adobe building iPhone Flash player

    A senior Adobe engineer confirmed the obvious at a Flash developer's conference in England that yes, they're building a Flash player especially for the iPhone. Paul Betlem from Adobe balked at saying the app was sure to be built into Apple's Safari browser that ships with the phone, but it seems a certainty. Flash websites and video clips are no longer the "Skip Intro" bane of the Web. Apple went out of its way to enable YouTube on the first iPhone. Enabling the iPhone to work on any Flash-based website seems the obvious next step in removing the functional differences between phone and laptop. (Photoillustration by Jackson West)

    3:00 PM on Tue Sep 30 2008
    By Paul Boutin
    6,619 views, 5 comments

    Latest by newtonke: This is great. Diggnation and Tom Green streaming on my iPhone. I wonder what those players will look like... more »

  • Blamestorming

    Adobe: Amazon.com goof allowed free movie downloads

    Amazon.com's Video On Demand service, which allows you to preview and purchase streaming videos online, uses Adobe's Flash Media Server to deliver the video. Late last week, Reuters reported that hackers had discovered an exploit that would allow users to turn the free preview into the full stream, allowing folks to watch movies for free using software like Replay Media Catcher from Applian. Adobe took issue with Reuters' contention that Flash isn't secure — instead suggesting it was Amazon's fault for not enabling various security options such as streaming encryption and player verification. Why did Adobe choose to blame a customer instead of quietly fixing the problem behind the scenes? Probably seemed easier.

    8:40 AM on Tue Sep 30 2008
    By Jackson West
    483 views, Comment

  • Culture of Complaint

    Dear Adobe, we hate you

    DearAdobe.com catalogs and organizes by popularity and product bite-sized rants against Adobe, the software company that creates products like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash which have become industry standards for creative professionals. Messages seem to convey one idea over and over: Dear Adobe, Your bloatware is slow and costs too much.

    9:20 AM on Thu Sep 11 2008
    By Jackson West
    802 views, 7 comments

    Latest by Drunken Economist: Actually, the Windows start up times have nothing on opening a PDF in Acrobat [Pro or Reader] on a Mac. Every more »

  • online video

    NBC dumps Microsoft Silverlight after Olympics

    NBC streamed all its NBCOlympics.com videos using Microsoft's Silverlight backend tech, but the network dumped Microsoft before last night's NFL kickoff — streamed live over NBCSports.com and NFL.com — opting to use Adobe Flash instead. Why? Because, as SAI notes, while 40 million US visitors to NBCOlympics.com didn't have Silverlight installed, Adobe Flash is already installed on some 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. NBC's move didn't pay off last night. The feed was unwatchable over a broadband connection, serving up freeze fames, blurry action and skipping back and forth as the it tried to buffer.

    7:20 AM on Fri Sep 5 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    22,190 views, 27 comments

    Most discussed WagCurious: This is pretty simple. For live events flash encoder techs fall back to the Sorenson codec which is atrocious. Since more »

  • online video

    Amazon.com's video on demand more "piddling" than "streaming"

    While Amazon.com makes no claims as to the quality of video from its new "video on demand" online streaming service being comparable to DVD quality, a measly 1.2 megabit-per-second data rate is still laughable. To put it in perspective, standard-definition DVDs typically run well over 6Mbps (Apple, also risibly, calls the 5Mbps offerings from iTunes "HD," purely based on pixel dimensions and not data depth). And based on your connection speed, Amazon might deliver even less digital resolution. All of this for up to $14.99 to "own" a movie stored wrapped in Adobe's Flash copy protection. Granted, Amazon is hindered by the slow broadband connections typical in American households, but keeping the bitrate low also keeps bandwidth costs down — and margins high.

    7:00 AM on Fri Sep 5 2008
    By Jackson West
    544 views, 4 comments

    Latest by Shadowlayer: Am I the only one seeing a big fat "UR DOIN IT RONG" with the pricing on amazon's service? more »

  • we read twitter so you don't have to

    Adobe-Yahoo rumor? Confab thrower's attention grab

    Professional linkbaiter Guy Kawasaki reports a "juicy tidbit" from the Gnomedex conference in Seattle: "Adobe is scratching their collective chins and in deep thought considering a Yahoo acquisition." We don't believe it. With a $23.61 billion market cap, Adobe isn't exactly in a position to spend $40 billion on Yahoo, even its stock price has finally sunk below where it was when Microsoft made its offer. So why the rumor? Look to its source: Chris Pirillo — the guy who puts on the Gnomedex conference, of which we admit to only a vague awareness before Pirillo sent a Twitter message about the rumor and got everyone talking about it. And him. And his conference.

    7:20 AM on Fri Aug 22 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    631 views, 1 comment

    Latest by Passerby: the day that happens is the day I uninstall all Adobe dev apps from my system. Seriously more »