Hide your firewalls! Adobe's CS3 may try to disable them
By Justin Berka | Published: May 18, 2007 - 05:04PM CT
There are a lot of users out there who don't like to use the firewall included with OS X for various reasons. It does, however, provide at least a decent amount of protection, especially for those who aren't behind another, perhaps a hardware firewall. The firewall also doesn't do much if you think you have it on, and it gets disabled thanks to some software that hasn't been tested for quite long enough.
If you are using the OS X firewall, and you've recently installed Creative Suite 3, you should probably be checking your firewall right about now. That's because the Adobe Version Cue CS3 installer will shut off your firewall. More specifically, during the installation for Version Cue, the installer has to turn off the firewall in order to set up some TCP ports. These ports need to be open for communication to and from the Version Cue server, and the firewall would otherwise prevent the installer from tinkering with them. The problem occurs once Version Cue setup is done. Rather than turn the firewall back on at the end, the Version Cue installer inexplicably leaves it turned off, opening your Mac up to all sorts of nastiness. There's no word on if it's a bug or just a curious omission, but if you buy any of the affected versions of CS3 in the next few months, it would be a good idea to check your firewall after installation.
The bug happens with any of the Design or Web versions of the Creative Suite, so there's a fairly large number of systems that are potentially affected by this. If Version Cue CS3 did turn off your firewall, all you have to do it go to the Sharing pane in System Preferences, find the Firewall tab, and start the firewall yourself. It's not a particularly malicious bug or a particularly hard fix, but it's definitely a bit sloppy, especially for a big release from a company like Adobe.
arstechnica.com |
