What to do About Java?
Another bad Java bug (CVE-2016-0636) was revealed recently; in this case it was actually a bug that was found back in 2013 and was just never patched properly. The vulnerability was publicly exposed a couple of weeks ago, and Oracle released a patch just this week. But either way, it's the same sad, old song: your computer's Java installation could allow a malicious webpage to quickly, quietly, and entirely take complete control. All your files, all your processes, exposed. Everything you have access to on the network, the attacker has access to. But what can you do about it? There will always be vulnerabilities popping up, and Java is an essential part of using the web, so we're just stuck with it, right? Well, that may have been (or seemed) true ten, or even five, years ago, but Java apps on the web have been declining in popularity for a long time. Most of go weeks or months without doing anything online that requires the use of a Java runtime interpreter on ou...