Quick one today, because I spent about ninety minutes last night doing something I do maybe twice a year and hate every single time: manually hunting down and killing off old Flash Player installs on three different machines in this house.
Adobe put out an emergency patch on Thursday for Flash Player, and it's not the usual "eh, get to it whenever" kind of update. There are two zero-day holes in it that were already being used in actual attacks before the fix existed — one of them apparently got delivered through a booby-trapped Word document, which is such a weird, old-school infection vector that it almost made me laugh. Word docs! In 2013! And yet here we are, because enough people still have Office and Flash both installed and both out of date that it's worth somebody's time to build that.
If you're on Windows or a Mac and you've got Flash sitting in Firefox, Safari, or as a standalone plugin, go check your version right now. Chrome and IE10 update Flash on their own so you're probably fine there, but everything else is on you. Adobe's site will just tell you flat out if you're current. Takes thirty seconds.
I know I complain about Flash every time this happens and I'm going to keep doing it because nothing has changed my mind. It's 2013, YouTube already defaults a lot of people to HTML5 video, and I still can't get through a single week without some plugin crash notice popping up in a tab I forgot I had open. My dad called me on Tuesday because his browser kept freezing and it turned out to be six copies of Flash-related processes eating his RAM from tabs he never closes. I fixed it in about four minutes and he thanked me like I'd done surgery. This is basically my unpaid part-time job now, tech support for relatives who refuse to close browser tabs, ever, on principle apparently.
Anyway. Patch it, especially if you're the designated IT person for your family too, because you know exactly who's going to call you if you don't remind them.
Completely unrelated tangent, but I can't stop thinking about the Oreo tweet from the Super Bowl blackout last weekend. Quick recap for anyone who missed it: the power went out at the Superdome for like 34 minutes during the game, everybody was just sitting there in the dark waiting, and Oreo's social team fired off a simple little image that said "you can still dunk in the dark" within minutes. That's it. No huge production, no ten rounds of legal review, just a fast, funny, on-brand reaction to something happening live. It got shared everywhere, and now half the marketing blogs I read are treating it like some kind of watershed moment for brands doing real-time social media.
Honestly, I think they're right, even though "watershed moment" is a phrase I'd normally roll my eyes at. What got me is how it exposed which companies actually have someone empowered to hit publish on something clever without a committee meeting first, and which ones need three days and a sign-off chain to tweet a picture of a cookie. Most brand Twitter accounts are still run like press releases. This was the opposite of that, and it worked because it didn't feel like marketing, it felt like a person watching the same blackout you were watching and being quick about it.
I don't really have a brand to run so I have no stake in this beyond finding it genuinely fun to watch play out in real time on my phone while the stadium lights were still off. But if I were advising anyone on this stuff I'd tell them: the value isn't in the cookie joke itself, it's in having somebody trusted enough to make that call without asking permission. Most companies would rather be slow and safe than fast and occasionally embarrassing, and I get why, but it means they'll never get a moment like that one.
Also, completely separately, I watched basically all of House of Cards this week in like three sittings because Netflix dumped the whole season at once instead of doing weekly episodes, and I'm still not sure how I feel about a Friday night that starts at 9pm and ends with me realizing it's 1am and I've watched five episodes of a show about a scheming congressman. Good show. Bad decision-making on my part.
Go update Flash.