In case you haven’t seen, there’s a terrible unpatched vulnerability in Java right now that baddies are using to install randomware on PCs. Then, this morning, I saw that Oracle has known about this vulnerability since August, and hasn’t bothered to fix it properly yet. That should be criminal negligence, but the rules are different for billionaires.
Of course, I’ve been saying for ages that we’d all be better off if we just uninstalled Java completely, but I know very few people who’ve done it, out of fear they’ll break something. (Those same people often refuse to patch Java, out of the same fear.) I was trying to figure out why anyone would want to run Java these days anyway, and then I saw this quote, via David Huff:
“Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.” –Edward Felten and Gary McGraw
That explains everything. Java is exceptionally good at making animated dancing pigs.
All of the major sites are recommending that you disable Java in your web browser. I continue to recommend just uninstalling it entirely, since Oracle is more interested in dancing pigs than in security.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.