Security advisories for Wednesday [LWN.net]

Security advisories for Wednesday

Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:28 UTC (Thu) by ledow (guest, #11753)
Parent article: Security advisories for Wednesday

Seems quite a bold move on the Red Hat/RealPlayer part - they've just removed the RealPlayer package entirely. I imagine that some people might be hit by this, especially as they aren't providing the updated version because it contains "proprietry codecs" (a funny statement if ever there was one - what did it contain before?).

I understand the problem - you can't have abitrary code execution OR an unlicensed codec and there's little other choice, but I would have thought they would have made more of a fuss about this or, alternatively, negotiated with Real beforehand to try to sort out either problem.

But then, there you go - that's what you get for bundling closed-source apps, I suppose.

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Security advisories for Wednesday

Posted Sep 19, 2008 21:00 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

RealPlayer and other proprietary applications are included in a separate supplementary channel in RHN and is unsupported. It is not bundled within the distribution and never installed by default. Most of them have been dropped over a period of time and Red Hat has put some effort into doing so. Developing and maintaining Evince including forms support and Liberation fonts for instance.