A major revision of Apple's Mac OS X operating system released this week fails to come bundled with a vital, recently-issued security fix.
A security patch (2004-05-24) which guards against a vulnerability in the Help viewer sub-system is absent from the Mac OS X version 10.3.4, despite claims to the contrary by Apple.
Reg hardware editor Tony Smith found it's necessary to install the patch manually, confirming reports on Mac enthusiast sites. The OS update does not overwrite previously applied patches, however, and these should show up as available via Software Update. That's providing a user bothers to double-check after being told that he/she is told they are perfectly safe by Apple.
This confusion is compounded by Apple, which has thus far failed to address another critical - and easily exploitable - security hole which it wrongly told Techworld was fixed by the Help Viewer patch.
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