Yet another article (deftly titled “Apple in a bind over its DNS patch?”) points out that Apple still hasn’t patched the serious DNS flaw that we have written about several times. The problem is that Apple depends on third-party software, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS Server, and this software’s recent releases “may be unstable for some users”. Another problem is that BIND is “used on the vast majority of name serving machines on the Internet.”
Security researchers say it is more important to install patches for this DNS vulnerability than worry about the performance problems it may cause. While Apple may be lagging because of this performance, their delay is, alas, par for the course: at times, it takes Apple as much as three months to patch open source software elements that are used in Mac OS X.
