Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2016/04/19/apple-abruptly-pulls-plug-on-quicktime-for-windows/#3de3756c775c
Apple abruptly decided to cease development and future support of its QuickTime player for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Normally when a company discontinues development of a product, it comes with much prior warning along with instructions on what the general public should do when development and support of that product stop. In typical Apple fashion, however, the company took the liberty to just scrub their own website of any mention to a “QuickTime for Windows” download file. The company also didn’t release any kind of statement to its QuickTime users letting them know of the change.
Now, you may be wondering why Apple abruptly ending software development of a product is such a big deal. Well, anytime a company does this, this also means that security vulnerabilities with the software will no longer be patched through software updates. This means that the millions of users who have QuickTime for Windows installed on their computers are now completely open to have malicious attacks performed through their computers via this now-unsupported software. According to the article, using unsupported software opens the door to potential negative consequences such as loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, as well as damage to system resources or business assets (Forbes 2016).
As a result, the risk has been deemed so severe that even the Department of Homeland Security has released a public statement urging anyone using QuickTime for Windows to uninstall the program from their computers as soon as possible. Clearly, the risk for potential harm could be very great if the vulnerabilities in QuickTime are exposed and utilized by hackers.
This potential for harm is only exponentially multiplied when you take into account the sheer number of users that likely have QuickTime installed on their Windows PCs. QuickTime for Windows has been around since the 1990s. It used to be required by anyone using iTunes, but that requirement has recently been dropped. QuickTime’s functionality has also been greatly eclipsed by alternative software in the marketplace. But even though you may not be an active QuickTime user, the chances of you still having this program installed on your PC is very great.
There’s also a pretty significant ethical side of the equation to take a look at here. As I said earlier, normally when a company discontinues development of a piece of software, they do so by putting in place the necessary provisions to enable users to safely and successful either migrate to a newer piece of (supported) software OR to uninstall the affected software. In the case of QuickTime for Windows, apple did neither. While of course Apple has the right to discontinue any one of its products, they should be doing so in a way that limits risk to their users. When usage of QuickTime is as widespread as it is, Apple really should have initiated some systems to help mitigate and avoid risk on their customers.
In addition to posing a significant security risk to consumers with QuickTime installed on their Windows PCs, this also has caused both security and development headache for other companies that happens to utilize QuickTime in their software applications. Developers now have to cut into productivity time to update their apps to not use QuickTime anymore. Adobe has already felt this headache as they’ve had to notify users of Adobe Creative Cloud of this new change by Apple.
Clearly, Apple really didn’t seem to take their user’s security concerns into great account when discontinuing QuickTime. In doing so without warning, they’ve put many of their users at risk to malicious computer hackers. All companies have to discontinue products at one point or another; it’s just a way of business for everyone. However, Apple has set an example of how not to handle these situations. Other companies should take note of this to ensure that they don’t repeat Apple’s careless mistakes.
My guess is that you aren't a big Apple fan. The article clearly stated, "Companies discontinue products all the time. Quicktime for Windows has been around since the early 90s and I think was the first piece of Windows software released by Apple. However, since its feature set has been eclipsed by other programs over the years it sort of makes sense to discontinue it,” states Cris Thomas, Strategist for Tenable Network Security. "In fact, for most users there is no need for Quicktime at all. It is no longer required by iTunes and web video is usually served by HTML 5 these days."
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly advisable to remove it, and there is a lot of guidance on this, including at the Apple site (which should probably remove the download button).
But according to Thomas, "Since the current version of Quicktime for Windows 7.7.9 removed the browser plugin anyway there is no way for an attack to automatically compromise a system with a simple drive-by exploit. The attacker would have to convince a victim to download a specially crafted file and then get them to open it in Quicktime.”
Just some nuanced perspective. Great article! I had no idea!