Items tagged with (NASDAQ:ADBE)
Researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley are collaborating on a method to detect facial manipulations made to digital photos in Photoshop. While development is in the early stages, it is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio, and document manipulations in today's landscape of fake news. Sometimes it is as easy as pie to detect a manipulated image. Take the photo at the top of this article, for instance—our knowledge of the world tell us that dogs do not normally dress up in suits and walk around like humans, and so that is obviously an altered image. But in other cases, the changes are not so blatant. That in and of itself is not a problem. It is when altered...
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Adobe is one of the biggest names in software for creating and editing photos and video. The company's Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Photo, and Lightroom are the apps that most people are familiar with. However, users of older versions of Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, are being told to stop using these out-of-date versions or they could face infringement claims from third-party companies. Adobe hasn't named the third party company, but word on the street is that Dolby has brought the infringement claims against Adobe CC. Adobe has stated that ongoing litigation is the reason it is warning users to stop using certain versions of its apps. Adobe said in a...
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Adobe doesn't have the best of histories when it comes to software like Flash and Shockwave. Both have been leveraged by nefarious types to take advantage of computer users over the years. Flash is such a risk that Firefox 69 disables it by default. Adobe has announced that Flash will see the end of its life next year. Meanwhile, Shockwave will die off before then with an official end of life date announced by Adobe. Adobe says that the end of Shockwave will be April 9, 2019. After that date, Shockwave will be discontinued, and the Shockwave Player for Windows will no longer be available for download. Adobe does note that companies with Enterprise licenses for Shockwave will receive support until...
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At one point in time, it seemed like Adobe's Flash animation plugin was invincible. How could such a widely-used API ever die off? Well, as it turns out, when the plugin in question has been riddled with security vulnerabilities for most of its life, sometimes the developer will do the world a favor and put the solution out to pasture. In 2017, Adobe announced that it was doing just that. Flash was effectively dead, or at least will be by the end of 2020. Shortly after that announcement, Google announced that Chrome would cease support for the plugin at the same time, and inevitably, we knew every other browser maker would follow suit. Microsoft also jumped in vowing to kill support in 2020 for...
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Seeing is believing, but you can't always trust your eyes, especially now that we are living in the digital age of photography. For better or worse, programs like Photoshop make it all too easy to manipulate an image. It's great for photographers who want to clean up their images, but can also be used for nefarious purposes. Can you ever really be sure that what you're looking at is the real deal? Probably not, though to help with that very task, Adobe is leveraging artificial intelligence to detect when a photo has been doctored. On the surface, that might not seem like a big deal. However, we are living in an era where the bulk of information about any given topic is shared online. The ease...
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Adobe has added support for Microsoft's puck-shaped Surface Dial accessory to Photoshop CC, the hugely popular photo editing program that is both feature-rich and at times complex. This is a big win for Microsoft, as app support for the Surface Dial has not exactly been robust to this point. It originally launched as a companion device to the Surface Studio all-in-one PC, but with Photoshop CC compatibility, the Surface Puck gains street cred, and a potentially bigger audience. "There is something magical about the combination of Surface Dial and Surface Pen. When you fold these capabilities in with the Adobe Creative Cloud and the collective power of Surface hardware, artists can create in more...
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Are you guys ready to get rid of Flash? We here at HotHardware definitely are, and thankfully, Adobe has already seen the writing on the wall. Adobe gave us our first glimpse at the impending death of Flash back in late 2015 — we just didn’t think that it would take five years for the blood to finally drain from the plugin’ increasingly lifeless body. Adobe today confirmed that it will no longer distribute or update Flash by the close of the year 2020. Hopefully, the “true” demise of Flash will happen quickly after that point since there will be no security updates to protect users from the scores of exploits that plague the software. With no support from Adobe, customers and developers would...
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For over 13 years, Microsoft has been issuing monthly security updates for Windows on what is known as Patch Tuesday, typically the second Tuesday of every month. This month's update would have fell on Valentine's Day, except that Microsoft did something highly unusual—it delayed the Patch Tuesday rollout following the discovery of a "last minute issue that could impact some customers." Now a week later, Microsoft has issued an emergency patch for a flaw in Adobe Flash Player. The out-of-band release pertains to a critical vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that could allow an attacker to execute malicious code remotely. It affects Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows...
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Once again Google and Microsoft are at odds over the former's decision to disclose a zero-day vulnerability affecting the latter's Windows operating system. Google alerted both Adobe and Microsoft on October 21, 2016, of previously disclosed security flaws it discovered and in the time that has passed Adobe has issued patch (CVE-2016-7855) and Microsoft has not. Google's policy on zero-day and other critical vulnerabilities it believes are being actively exploited in the wild is to give software makers seven days to issue a patch or advisory. Once that time period elapses, Google discloses the security to the public. In this case, Google waited 10 days before disclosing the vulnerability on Halloween....
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Adobe acknowledged that it muffed an update to its Creative Cloud Desktop application last week, one that caused it to delete files on a "small number" of Mac systems. Once it became aware of the issue, Adobe pulled the plug on the update and has since made another one available for both Mac and Windows systems (there's no indication that the issue affects Windows PCs). "In a small number of cases, the updater may incorrectly remove some files from the system root directory with user writeable permissions. We have removed the update from distribution, and are in the process of deploying a new update which addresses the issue. When prompted for the update, Creative Cloud members should install...
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As if Adobe's Flash Player needed another nail in its coffin, it nevertheless received yet another one this weekend from Facebook. The world's largest social playground announced that it recently flipped the switch over to HTML5 to be the default video player for videos on its website, and that includes the ones that appear in its News Feed. "From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs," Facebook stated in a blog post. You could see this coming from a country mile, though it didn't happen overnight. Facebook had to address several...
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At this point, we are no longer surprised that Adobe Flash is being used as an easy vector to exploit computers and entire network. Back in the day, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs trashed Adobe Flash, calling it buggy, full of security holes and detrimental to the battery life of mobile devices. Five years later, Flash is still with us and it is still wreaking havoc on all three of those fronts. The latest Flash vulnerability was revealed this week, and it affects ALL version of the software — yes, even version 19.0.0.207, which was released on Tuesday. The exploit, which is labeled CVE-2015-7645, was masterminded by a group known as Pawn Storm. For now, the exploit hasn’t been directed at the...
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Can I get an “Amen” from the congregation? The planets are aligning and it appears that more heavy-hitters are throwing support behind taking down one the Internet’s greatest villains: Adobe Flash. Back in June, we brought you news that Google would be introducing a new “Intelligent Pause” function to Chrome that would disable all Flash content by default (or give Chrome the option to choose what Flash content is deemed worthy). If for some reason you actually need to access a blocked Flash element on a site, you will have the option to click on the element to re-enable it. Google favors HTML5 over Flash Google today confirmed that Chrome will block Flash elements by default starting on September...
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Adobe's Flash platform is running out of friends. You may recall that a few weeks ago Mozilla disabled Flash by default in its Firefox browser due to the discovery of multiple critical vulnerabilities, and around the same time, Facebook's chief security officer urged Adobe to set a kill date for its buggy API. Expect more of those sentiments following a recent week long attack on Yahoo's ad network. Security outfit Malwarebytes discovered the "malvertising" campaign, which kicked off on July 28. It involved hackers purchasing ads across Yahoo's various sites and then injecting them with malicious code. The malware would then seek out vulnerable versions of Flash to deliver payloads and ultimately...
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