Adobe has announced it will discontinue its Creative Suite product, and will instead concentrate on Creative Cloud.
A number of outlets, including TNW, CNET, and Slashot, are reporting that Adobe will be switching to the subscription-only service, with no further versions of Creative Suite planned after the current CS6.
In response to two zero-day vulnerabilities, Adobe has released out-of-band emergency updates for their Flash Player.
Since last fall, Flash has formally been on a regular update schedule like many large software projects, but InfoWorld reports that this emergency fix constitutes the first patch since the schedule was established. Adobe identifies the update as “critical” as the vulnerabilities it fixes are being actively exploited in the wild on both Windows and Mac OS X.
CNET also has an article about this update, and includes a convenient list of recommendations for end users.
For a short period on Monday, Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) was made available for free download without any activation requirement. As this Ars Technica post points out, it was a nearly brilliant move that turned out to have been done by mistake.
When Adobe shut down the activation servers for Creative Suite 2, there was no longer any way for users of the software to permanently reinstall it. Strangely, rather than offer a patch to make activation unnecessary, a full copy of the software package was made available for download along with a working serial number. Beyond that, all that was required was a free-to-create Adobe ID. The news of this spread quickly through Twitter and CS2 was downloaded an untold number of times.
Instead of rolling with it, as the linked article argues they ought to have, Adobe put out a clarification and removed the download page, thus putting an end to free CS2 downloads.