Four Patches Released By Real Network For Critical Bugs in Multimedia Player

RealNetworks has issued four critical patches for several versions of its RealPlayer running on Windows, Linux and Apple's Mac OS X.The flaws could allow a hacker to run malicious code on a PC or cause the computer to reveal information, according to an advisory from Secunia, a security vendor based in Denmark.

RealPlayer is an application that plays audio and video streamed over the Internet.

RealNetworks has published a table detailing which vulnerabilities affect certain player versions on the different platforms. Some users will need to download an entire new version of the application, while others may be able to just download patches.

One of the problems involves the handling of frames in SWF (Shockwave Flash) files due to a design error, which can cause a heap-based buffer overflow, Secunia said.

Another problem causes a stack-based buffer overflow when a media file is imported using an ActiveX control, Microsoft's technology that adds extra functionality to Web pages.

A third flaw is described by RealPlayer as allowing local resources to be accessed. The fourth also involves ActiveX, where a timing issue with "Controls", "Console", or "WindowName" properties can be maliciously manipulated to corrupt RealPlayer's memory, Secunia said.

Secunia ranked the flaws as "highly critical," the vendor's second-highest ranking of risk. The flaws were found by Peter Vreugdenhil, Elazar Broad, Dyon Balding of Secunia and another anonymous researcher, Secunia said.

MS Office for Mac Sales Soar, VBA Support To Return

Apple is selling more Macintosh computers than ever before -- and that's having unexpected benefits for Microsoft. Sales of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac are triple the volume for the previous 2004 version of the productivity software and are the highest in the product's history, Microsoft announced Tuesday."The response has been amazing -- since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac business unit at Microsoft. The 2008 version launched at the MacWorld show this year.

"As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and will also expand our staff to ensure that Office for Mac remains the most powerful and compatible productivity suite for Mac customers," Eisler said.

SP1 Released

Microsoft also released Service Pack 1 for the Mac Office suite, featuring "suitewide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements."

SP1 addresses compatibility issues between the Mac and Windows versions of Excel; improves Entourage support for Exchange Server, including the ability to remove attachments from Exchange messages and synchronizing to the server; and provides minor improvements for Word and PowerPoint.

Bloggers said the most notable addition in SP1 is support for Excel chart-formatting options that were available in previous versions of Office.

VBA Support To Return

Microsoft also said it will bring back Visual Basic for Applications support to the Mac in the next version of Office for Mac. A press release said Microsoft "recognizes that VBA language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms." The prior version supported AppleScript and the Automator scripting tool.

The removal of VB was not due to any of the "conspiracy theories" floated around, such as that Microsoft was trying to "slowly kill the Mac" or drive users to Windows versions of the software, Erik Schwiebert, a software design lead in Microsoft's Mac business unit, wrote on his blog. The decision was driven by the technical difficulties of including VB for the latest version of Apple's operating system, he wrote.

While technical challenges remain, "for a while now I and several others have been working with a group of people who know a heck of a lot about the internals of VB," Schwiebert wrote, "and once we determined that we could achieve the revival of VB in the new schedule for the next version of Mac Office, we locked it into place on the feature list."

The high volume of sales for the current version indicates that a lack of VBA support isn't a big deal for most Mac users, Schwiebert said. As to when the next version will be released, the developer assured readers it will be less that four years.