The company ended support for a Windows program without telling anyone
Although it’s annoying when technology companies end support for products and services, at least they normally give you plenty of notice. When Google stops updating Picasa on 1 May, almost three months will have passed since the company announced the news. Microsoft meanwhile tells you years in advance when support for different versions of Windows will end (see the lifecycle page at www.snipca.com/20301).
Apple by contrast has been accused of ending support for one of its Windows programs without telling anyone. On 14 April, security experts at Trend Micro said that Apple hasn’t updated the Windows version of its media player QuickTime since January, and has no further plans to do so.
This is serious because there are two vulnerabilities in QuickTime that hackers can exploit to take over your PC. Apple will never fix these flaws, so you should uninstall QuickTime now.
To find out whether you have QuickTime on your computer click Start, then type quicktime. If you see it listed under the Programs heading, click Start again, then click the Control Panel, and under Programs click ‘Uninstall a program’. Finally, right-click the QuickTime listing then click Uninstall.
In a blog post (www.snipca.com/20299) Trend Micro said that QuickTime joins Windows XP and Java 6 as fundamentally unsafe programs that place users at “ever increasing risk” of being hacked. In an unusual move, the US government also urged Windows users to uninstall QuickTime. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said that PCs running unsupported software “are exposed to elevated cybersecurity dangers, such as increased risks of malicious attacks or electronic data loss” (read more at www.snipca. com/20304).
Nobody should be surprised by Apple’s decision. QuickTime is a 25-year-old program, a veteran in software terms, and is no longer widely used. For years Windows users needed it to play videos in iTunes, but not since 2011. And while QuickTime for Windows stalled at version 7 (released way back in 2005), its Mac equivalent has reached version 10.
Apple could therefore argue that the absence of a new version for Windows 7, 8 or 10 was a clear sign that QuickTime was on the way out, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of confirmation. The company could also claim that it has described QuickTime as “legacy” software for some time, meaning that it’s out of date. But that’s the kind of infuriating jargon that the average user can’t be expected to understand.
The question remains: why did it take a security company to confirm QuickTime’s demise? Even more worryingly, Apple hasn’t even updated its QuickTime web pages to warn users. While it does have an ‘Uninstall QuickTime’ page (www.snipca.com/20300), there’s no mention of the program being unsafe. Look at the bottom of the page and you’ll see that it was “last modified” on 9 March.
Worse still, go to Apple’s download page for QuickTime Windows (www.snipca.com/20305) and you’ll see no reference to its security flaws. This leads many people to one conclusion: Apple isn’t just indifferent to people running Windows, it almost wants to punish them for not using a Mac. Its lack of urgency and clarity is an insult to Windows users.
THE FACTS
• Security experts say that Apple has ended support for QuickTime in Windows, but the company hasn’t confirmed it publically
• QuickTime contains two serious security flaws that will never be fixed
• Experts and the US govt are urging Windows users to uninstall QuickTime