Sunday, January 20, 2013

Q&A: Is Java safe to use?

<p>Story HighlightsUse Java in your web browser at your own riskUpdate Java for the latest security settings and upgradesTip: Yahoo adds mail encryption</p><p>Question: If Java is so vulnerable, why is it on our browsers as an option, and what does it do anyway? If it is "disabled," what can my computer not do?</p><p>Answer: Once again, Oracle's Java software is in the news as a hazard to your Mac or PC. Six days after the discovery of a severe vulnerability led Oracle to rush out a patch, on Wednesday security writer Brian Krebs reported a different such "zero-day exploit" that could be used to attack this widely-deployed program.</p><p>This is not what people, myself included, hoped when Sun Microsystems released the first versions of Java in the mid-1990s. Back then, the idea was to make the Web more than a way to display words and pictures; you could instead embed a small Java program in a page, and anybody with Sun's Java virtual-machine software installed could run that "applet."</p><p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2013/01/18/rob-pegoraro-java/1840219/">Keep reading...</a></p>

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