Adobe stock jumped on Thursday following reports in the media that Microsoft has identified it as an acquisition target. The New York Times reported that Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer met with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in San Francisco recently to talk about Apple’s dominance in smartphones.
According to the report, which cited employees and consultants familiar with the situation, the two discussed several options to deal with the situation, one of which would see Microsoft acquiring Adobe. Adobe stock rose 17 percent to a high of $30 before settling back to close up 11.5 percent at $28.69 on the Nasdaq.
A Microsoft acquisition of Adobe would cost $15 billion or more based on Adobe’s current market value. It would provide Microsoft with control of Adobe’s flash player, used all over the web for video and graphics. Wall Street analysts see it as a possible way for Microsoft to integrate graphics and video capabilities into software it develops for phones and tablet computers.
“It’s certainly possible,” said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran of a potential deal. “It may be a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and both Microsoft and Adobe have a common enemy in Apple. The Flash platform in Microsoft’s hands might be an interesting competitive weapon against Apple.”
Microsoft already has its own Silverlight media platform, but it has failed to gain prominence in the market.
Result for: silverlight
Microsoft, during their latest Patch Tuesday, has plugged 34 security holes while updating 14 security bulletins.
Four of the most critical bulletins were rated “highest priority” for enterprises.
14 bulletins is the highest amount of security bulletins ever released by the software giant during a Patch Tuesday, and a full eight were rated critical.
The four aforementioned “highest priority” bulletins are (via EW): MS10-052, which resolves a vulnerability in Microsoft’s MPEG Layer-3 audio codecs; MS10-055, which addresses a vulnerability in the Cinepak Codec used by Windows Media Player to support the AVI audiovisual format; MS10-056, which deals with four vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office; and MS10-060, which resolves two vulnerabilities in Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight.
Joshua Talbot, a security intelligence manager of Symantec Security Response pinpointed one of the none critical bulletins as being potentially very dangerous as well. That bulletin is MS10-054: “The SMB [protocol] pool overflow vulnerability [covered in MS10-054] should be a real concern for enterprises. Not only does it give an attacker system-level access to a compromised SMB server, but the vulnerability occurs before authentication is required from computers contacting the server. This means any system allowing remote access and not protected by a firewall is at risk.
“Best practices dictate that file or print sharing services, such as SMB servers, should not be open to the Internet. But such services are often unprotected from neighboring systems on local networks. So, a cyber-criminal could use a multistaged attack to exploit this vulnerability … [and] this issue affects more than just file servers using the SMB service. Workstations that have enabled file and print sharing are also at risk.”
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Result for: silverlight
Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.4 with “Crash Protection” which isolates third-party plug-ins when they crash, if you are using the Windows or Linux versions of the browser, allowing the main browser to remain stable.
Today, the company has had to rush out another small update, after the company was bombarded by complaints from Farmville players, the popular game available through Facebook.
The complaints mainly came from users with older computers, which were seeing the game crash from within their browser due to Firefox’s update.
How “Crash Protection” works, explains Mozilla, is if Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight crash or become unresponsive for over 10 seconds, the browser kills the plug-in.
Users with older computers say the 10-second rule is too short, as they normally have 30 seconds or more of non-responsiveness, when playing any games requiring a plug-in.
Says Mozilla: “Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plug-ins, especially with games. For these users, the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short.”
The new update bumps the termination period to 45 seconds.
Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug-tracking database says complaints mainly came from Farmville players.
“Now that (Firefox) 3.6.4 has shipped, we are seeing an increasing number of reports that some users are unable to play Farmville, because Farmville hangs the browser long enough for our timeout to trigger and kill it,” adds Mozilla developer Justin Dolske. “Let’s hit this with a big hammer and make it 45 (seconds).”
