October is the month that kicks off the holiday season, but
for IT professionals the "update party" never stops, with
Chrome bringing even 21 security fixes this month.
October is the month that kicks off the holiday season, ending
with hordes of ghosts and goblins on doorsteps throughout the
country. For IT professionals, though, the really scary thing about
the end of the month is looking back at the software updates
released during the past four weeks, and hoping that we got all of
them installed properly and they'll fix the security flaws and
not result in any "unintended consequences."
I spent most of October in Europe, cruising the Mediterranean,
but there's no escaping the inevitable. When I got back, I
found a basket of updates waiting to be installed. All in all, it
was a light-to-medium month in terms of the number of patches
released by the major software vendors. Apple came out with six,
Adobe with four, Mozilla had only one security update for
