01.30.10

Shockwaves from the Past

Posted in Software at 8:06 pm by Smokey

There’s been a little news recently about Adobe’s Shockwave Player plug-in (anyone out there still remember Director? The application people used to use to make multimedia demos for CDs, and for which Shockwave was invented as the companion web player?), though I imagine in most places this news been drowned out by the “news” that Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in still isn’t anywhere to be found on iPhone OS-type devices.

Specifically, the news about Shockwave Player (aka Shockwave for Director, back when Shockwave was the “it” brand and Shockwave Flash was the new kid on the block) has a security vulnerability and “users” need to remove any previous Shockwave 11 and update to version 11.5.6r606 to protect themselves. This would be all fine and dandy, if people who actually used Shockwave were the only ones to have it installed in the first place.

Coincidentally, however, Security Update 2010-001 was released on the very same day (19 January) as the Shockwave vulnerability and the new version 11.5.6r606. Guess what? On Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, Apple helpfully reinstalls…Shockwave 10, version 10.1.1.r16, from February 2006! Luckily Shockwave 10 is PPC-only, so it won’t even be loaded by browsers on most Macs running the new Security Update 2010-001, but it’s still another piece of useless cruft.

If you’ve installed Security Update 2010-001 (and if you haven’t, go start Software Update right now), you probably want to remove this ancient version by removing the support folder and the plug-in itself:
/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Shockwave 10
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave

For those of you with PPC Macs, I’m not sure whether version 10 or 11 wins out if you end up with both of them installed. However, if you do need to play Shockwave animations in Camino 2, you should be sure to remove version 10, as Camino 2 no longer contains the hack that Shockwave 10 required in order to be loaded by modern browsers. In any case, Shockwave 10 probably has security vulnerabilities, too, and you’re likely to be best off moving to version 11.5.6r606 and staying up-to-date.

Oh, and, Apple, could you please not plague us with any more Shockwaves from the distant past in future Mac OS X security updates? That would be swell.

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