An Adobe security advisory has been posted regarding a vulnerability with Adobe Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player:

A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader v9 on Windows.

Read the full bulletin on adobe.com and the blog post from Adobe PSIRT for more details.

Following the FlaCC demos at past conferences, Adobe has released Alchemy on Adobe Labs.

Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

You can find more information and download the Alchemy toolkit on Adobe Labs.

Adobe MAX 2008 North America took place earlier this week in San Francisco. As expected, with the congregation of Flash heads in the Bay Area the blogosphere is active with Flash-related posts.

Dion Almaer talks about how the Flash platform could join the Open Web. He suggests:

Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight.

Following Almaer’s post, Brad Neuberg wrote up an exhaustive look at how Adobe could actually go about bringing Flash into the Open Web. He outlines six points:

1. Cross-Platform Standards
2. No Vendor Lock-in
3. Anyone Can Innovate
4. Powerful, Universal Clients
5. Open Source Implementations
6. Mashable, Searchable, and Integrated

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the aftermath of Adobe MAX, but these posts are sparking conservation on the idea of open-sourcing Flash (or aspects of the Flash platform) to the development community.

The official release of Flash Player 10 is now available. According to the press release:

Adobe Flash Player 10 builds on the capabilities of the world’s most pervasive application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration.

Download the full press release (PDF).

I’ll also remind you of the sIFR bug with Flash 10 we mentioned back in July. When you update your Flash Player, make sure to keep said bug in mind.

We could go on and on linking up reviews and demos of Flash CS4 over the next few weeks, so we’ll just keep adding links of minor importance to this post. Check back from time to time for updates.

• Flash CS4 Actions Panel FAQ
• Extending Adobe Flash Professional CS4
• Advanced Motion Editor and Presets
• Flash CS4 New Features on Lynda.com
• Flash CS4, Big Changes Ahead
• Flash CS4 Actions Panel FAQ
• Flash Player 10 Ligatures Demo

Lee Brimelow posted up a 19-minute feature tour on gotoAndLearn() — you’ll definitely want to head over there and check it out. As he says, it’s just enough to whet our collective appetities until Flash CS4 is officially released. However, it will probably blow your mind.

Today, Aaron Simpson at Cold Hard Flash posted a few videos demonstrating the new Bone Tool and Inverse Kinematics features of Flash CS4.

The Bone Tool basically allows you to group objects together as a flexible jointed object similar to how you’d rig a skeleton in a 3D application.

I recently discovered the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign blog. Their mission:

We want you and the whole Flash community to be aware of the issue that the current and possible future versions of the Flash Player will lack dynamic audio capabilities. You may ask why this is important but currently a lot of companies are developing online applications for text, video and image processing. We see software moving into the internet daily. Only audio is missing at the moment.

Their site lists out current Flash audio projects and suggests a wishlist for Adobe to consider. I think their cause is a valid one and, being an advocate for music myself, I’d like to see these advancements included into the Flash Player. Audio in Flash has definitely come a long way, but these recommendations could further solidify its already substantial lead.

Word on the street is that Adobe will be revealing CS4 on September 23rd. This is not a launch date, but we should get some juicy details to wet our palette until it does come out. If you were going to buy CS3, it may be worthwhile to hold off for a month or two (if at all possible).

Adobe’s released an upgrade to all version of the CS. Go to Adobe’s site for the official information. Flash Mazagine has a better take:

The only real news here for Flash/FLEX developers is the ability to embed SWF content inside Acrobat 9. In reality this is what you’d pay for. For Print professionals, this is much more interesting as the new PDF preview features alone can save failed print runs.

So – unless you work at a print shop and double as a print designer, you can safely ignore this upgrade.