Adobe working on a patch for 'critical' TIFF vulnerability in CS5 software

Yes, the original wording in Adobe's initial press release was rather convoluted but, once absorbed, fairly clear and unambiguous. I think this Verge article is parroting a false, revisionist history on Adobe's part.

> Everyone dealt with their Flash crap for years, Apple/HTML5/etc finally killed it, and now all they have left is the CS suite.

huh, Flash isn't dead... far from it.

Vulnerabilities in the CS products are manifestly less threatening than vulnerabilities in Flash. The interaction required to trigger the flaws is (usually) much more deliberate, and the installed base is much smaller. Also, outside of Acrobat Reader, it is much harder to construct a credible spear phishing campaign using CS5 document formats (your benefits statements aren't normally .AI files).

Flash and PDF were/are genuine frustrations for the industry, but not because Adobe was particularly irresponsible. Instead, the problems with PDF and Flash were (a) that they were large complicated C programs built at a time when secure programming wasn't widely understood and (b) they were installed everywhere, making them particularly juicy targets.

>As soon as a better crop of graphics apps comes around Adobe is finished.

As someone who works in the print/design/creative industry, I can tell you that the situation is far more complicated than you can imagine. The monopoly that Adobe has in this industry runs far deeper than you know. Every aspect of printing, from the creative applications, to the press rasterization technology is becoming Adobe from top to bottom.

This deep integration is only growing. There is literally nothing in sight that can come remotely close to what Abode provides. If the industry were still predominantly Postscript, there might be a chance. As it is, all the major RIP manufacturers are moving to the Adobe PDF engine, which can rasterize a PDF to the press, natively, without a Postscript flattening stage. Every other competitor out there who is currently using their own Postscript engine (and really, there are only three significant engines out there: Ghostscript, Global Graphics JAWS, and EFI Fiery) has also moved to Adobe, standard.

To get there we would need something that could replace PDF. But there is nothing. PDF is no longer Postscript. Postscript is still there, and can still be distilled into a PDF, but a PDF is capable of doing things that Postscript cannot do (and I'm not talking about any of the forms, scripting, video stuff). Perhaps EFI or Global Graphics have something in the works. I don't think so. If they did, EFI wouldn't be putting Adobe Extreme in their Fiery RIPs, and all the various RIPs that are built around the JAWS engine (Xitron, Harlequin, Onyx, Colorburst, Wasatch, Colorgate) would be looking to Global Graphics for a PDF engine. But they aren't. They are all going to Adobe.

Quark Xpress is dead. Corel is dead. Adobe has the industry by the balls, and I do not see that changing any time soon.