More Patches Than a 'Three Stooges' Tire
Some patches are good. When I was a teenaged hippie, I had nearly a hundred patches hand-sewn on my jeans. The pants were so frayed, my Swedish grandmother replaced the whole backside, which also soon got patched.
Other patches aren't so good -- patches on inner tubes that fall off faster than a 4-year-old on a two-wheeler, and "Patch Adams" are examples of that.
Microsoft patches are almost always good, so I'm optimistic that next Tuesday there will be another fine batch. And what a big batch it will be. Eight fixes are deemed critical (often, that term is scarier than need be).
These are equal-opportunity patches hitting everything from databases to productivity software to dev tools like Silverlight. And, of course, there's Windows. Windows needs so many patches I'm starting to worry about moths!
Most of these tools are beset by the same old beast: remote code execution exploits. Darn them! But the reliable denial-of-service and spoofing attacks also made a comeback. Give the hackers points for bringing back a couple of classics.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 2009