Adobe's Patch Schedule
by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu)
Created:  Jan 10, 2012
Updated:  Feb 15, 2012
http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/adobe.txt

***

A couple of years ago, Adobe announced that they would patch their
products every quarter, ala Oracle.  

This lasted for about five seconds.  Emergency flash patches started
appearing as soon as exploits became public (a good thing, to be
sure, but definitely not on a quarterly schedule).  Since flash is
part of Adobe/Acrobat Reader/Std/Pro, this meant that every flash
patch also required a patch for those programs.  Adobe brushed this
aside, weakly claiming that patching the flash component of Acrobat
was not the same as patching Acrobat, so it didn't count.

They continued in this manner, releasing patches more or less as
needed, until I finally decided that Adobe probably held their
annual corporate meetings twice a year.

But today Adobe outdid themselves.

After releasing 9.4.7 on Dec 16, 2011 to fix a security issue and
making it sound as if it was an "early" quarterly release, they
then released 9.5.0 today, Jan 10, 2012.  

No, thank *you* Adobe.

It's now clear that Adobe follows a rigorous and unchanging "whenever
the hell we want" schedule.

I love the Sumatra PDF reader.  I wish everyone did.

**

On Feb 14, 2012, Adobe released their bulletins for "black Tuesday",
one for Adobe Shockwave Player and one for RoboHelp.  Whew!  No 
worries this month.

They then released a flash update on Feb 15.

You can't make this stuff up.