After so many hacks, why won’t Java just go away?

If you’ve been paying any attention to the security breaches hitting Apple, Facebook, Twitter, NBC, and others these past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed a common culprit: our poor old pockmarked friend, Java.

Oracle’s aging code deployment platform has practically been a revolving door for widespread malware attacks recently, and for years the general consensus has often been that its risks have outgrown its usefulness. After spending a week Java-free back in 2010, PCMag’s Larry Seltzer concluded that the Java platform as a whole “is pretty clearly a failure, and all that remains of it is a big fat attack surface on your computer.”