Simon Willison’s Weblog

Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities. There’s a five month old Java arbitrary code execution vulnerability which hasn’t yet been patched by Apple. Disable Java applets in your browser until it’s fixed, or random web pages could execute commands on your machine as your user account.

Posted 19th May 2009 at 7:07 pm

Tagged apple, applets, browsers, java, osx, security

3 comments

I just surf around with Java dissabled because it makes things slow. I hate it when I go to a page and then the browser grinds to a halt as the applet loads. If I want to applet it up, I'll turn it back on. Man I wish there were an easy way to turn off all active embedded content and then activate it selectively. The majority of the flash I see is ads, I don't want that. When I want to watch a Flash movie, I'll turn flash on, alas too difficult.

Dave K - 19th May 2009 22:25 - #
Dave, have you tried ClickToFlash for Safari, or FlashBlock for Firefox?
Chris Mear - 20th May 2009 14:11 - #
Simon, I've written a post explaining how to disable the Java web browser plugin at the system level: Disable Java Applets in Most Mac Browsers.
Avi Flax - 20th May 2009 17:33 - #