Stefan Mileschin

Adobe, which had been heading for the title of most evil company for 2012, has changed its mind about requiring customers to pay to get recent security patches for its Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Professional products.

The company had been up for the award because of the way it was charging an arm and a leg for its products in countries which did not follow the Americans into their silly revolution. Australia is particularly furious.

But it was a dead cert for the title when it started demanding cash from CS5 customers to fix security cock ups in its software.

The patches were intended to patch vulnerabilities in Creative Suite 5 and earlier versions of the products could let a remote intruder execute malicious code and take control of computers running the software.

Adobe's answer to the problem was that punters would have to pay to upgrade to the Creative Suite 6 versions to get the fixes. This is despite the fact that CS5.1 would have cost most clients an arm and a leg.

As one user complained to Techeye: "It is bad enough that they charge us huge amounts for software which is more or less the same as it has been for years, but insisting that we pay more because they cocked it up and let hackers in, is a bit on the nose."

Apparently Adobe is now saying that said that it is the process of resolving the vulnerabilities in Adobe Illustrator CS5.x, Adobe Photoshop CS5.x (12.x) and Adobe Flash Professional CS5.x, and will update the respective security bulletins once the patches are available.

http://news.techeye.net/security/ado...s-cs5-for-free