Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain... Adobe has officially set a kill date for its beleaguered Flash. The Photoshop giant said today it plans to end support for the hacker-prone multimedia browser plugin by the end of 2020. This means no more updates for Flash Player after that date and the end of support on many browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer and …
Don't worry, I'm sure BT/Openreach (endorsed by slimeballs regulator Ofcom) will be using Flash and their shitty BTWholesale Flash based tester long past 2030 when their "up to" bamboozled, obfuscated Pointless G.fast has long become a can of "legacy firmware worms" to fault find, with Ofcom backtracking saying they were always "Technology Agnostic", wiping their hands of the problem, "Not us - folks, we just provide oversight".
Fcuking Weasels, the lot of 'em.
Regulation endorsed attack vectors, and they wonder why there is such a problem with malware infected bots out there. (No one should be forced to Adobe Flash, especially endorsed by a regulator like Ofcom, one hand not knowing what the other is doing)
BT Spoon fed MP's haven't a clue -"Don't worry BT will do the right thing. Yeah Right".
"A multitude of people are to blame for it becoming popular and still being around."
In my experience mostly Italian "web designers" who don't seem to have ever got their heads around HTML. Most Italian business sites are a 640x480 window in the middle of the page in which runs a shonky bit of Flash. Can't be resized, printed and the only page that you can link to is the "Home" page. Pointless flash done using Flash.
But only Adobe is to blame for the constant and unrelenting "You need to upgrade Flash Player", which seems to show up almost every time I try to play a video.
What is so unique about Flash that requires an upgrade to the latest version to play a damn video? VLC, for example, seems to play everything, and I can't remember when I last upgraded it.
"Flash was always a bad idea and Adobe did a terrible job, but, I don't recall Adobe forcing anyone to use it. A multitude of people are to blame for it becoming popular and still being around."
This. This is just one of those tools that allowed graphic designers, albeit talented ones, to start designing webapps with no idea about security or IT technology and then have the gall to say they were "IT Professionals". No! No! No!. You're artists and graphics professionals, simply making a cartoon robot dance in a browser window to the tune of "We Will Rock You" does not make you a veteran IT professional!!
As someone who works in the NHS, we haven't had XP machines anywhere in our hospitals for years. However if you look at many commissioning group GP phone servers, you'll find most are XP.. and will run that for the next decade unless something is done about it.
I seem to recall an explanation (perhaps even in this venerable organ, I cannot recall exactly where) that that statement actually means that you could find at least one computer running Windows XP in 90% of NHS hospitals. Not quite the same thing but that's the press for you.
Yes, but the AC above said "we haven't had XP machines *anywhere* in our hospitals". A statement than can be disproved by the same one XP box as used to generate the 90% number.
It's a purely pedantic argument. Well it is until that one XP box becomes the entry point for some nasty.
Why would the BBC have any interest in keeping Flash running? They've been transitioning over to html5 video for ages. I suspect they'd have ditched flash ages ago if it weren't for the fact that they have to keep things working for non-technical people who may not be running anything more modern than IE8
As an ex IM&T junior manager at county level, the XP boxes I was aware of were acting either as basically the command interfaces for MRI/Xray machines, and to serve a web server app to allow authorised clinicians to access scans digitally without needing to print and post hard copy, or were required to upload firmware updates to devices such as AED's.
Neither of those uses require flash. There is a gaping difference between "90% of the NHS still runs on exclusively XP desktops!" and "90% of NHS trusts has an XP laptop in a cupboard occasionally used for doing firmware updates on half a million quids worth of perfectly functioning AED's"
IIRC part of our mitigation strategy for the remaining XP boxes was a new image locked down beyond the point of paranoia which had neither flash or Adobe reader installed.
What Technology? Does it help my Golf Swing?
Does it involve me spending money that should otherwise go in my Bonus?
What's the rush. You guys are the best so a wet Friday Afternoon after you have been down the pub (I'm not buying btw) should see it done and dusted.
Your (N)ever present PHB
sent from my Galaxy S8+ from the 19th Hole.
Unfortunately, "end of support" for Flash doesn't mean that Flash players already out there will self-destruct, nor that all websites will remove Flash content.
What it means is that Flash bugs won't be fixed any more after that date.
Hopefully, browsers will blacklist the Flash plugins But I bet some people will clamour to have a way to re-enable it, so they can still run their legacy apps.
Or we'll have to carefully deploy an older version of Firefox and prevent updating to allow the plugin to run, doubling down on the problems that will arise from this.
I'm all for the death of flash and have been purging it where possible but I know of one fairly hefty national UK business who have just invested a fair chunk of cash into a new Learning System that is entirely dependent on flash.
I am sure that their plan for that high 6 figure investment doesn't involve scrapping it in under 3 years.
Seriously, they could just announce that they will only produce security updates through the end of this year, and the laggards who have stuck with it all this time can move on. If they haven't paid attention to all the years of security and performance issues and stuck with it until now, Adobe giving them until the end of 2020 isn't any different than giving them to the end of 2017. They're going to sit on their hands and do nothing until at least July 2020 anyway, because they don't care.
Which equipment are you referring to? Not saying there isn't such a thing, just that I've never seen it.
Besides, how the absence of updates prevent this very expensive equipment from working? Keep it off the internet and you don't care if Flash is secure or not. Would you even want to update the flash on it, since that alone might break something?
Identity Services Engine Admin portal from Cisco, for example. At least the version our network group have just deployed. Seemed most bizarre that the very thing I'd been tracking down and killing on my user's machines for the past year over security concerns was suddenly required to be on my machine when the network team implemented the new authentication system.
Since most informed people have stopped using it anyhow.
I expect that the majority of users are just the corporate's out there who aren't sure whats still using it - hint - probably more malware than line of business applications.
Obviously they are less likely to be running an up-to-date browser that understands HTML5 at which point the need for flash is significantly smaller. .
I've been running without it for a long while, there are a couple of sites still whine that they want to install it - no I just go elsewhere to providers that have updated to not required this evil technology.
Remote-troubleshooting a relative's PC, I asked him to go to a speed test website. Yep -- it said he needed Flash. OK, try another -- same thing, must have recent version of Flash enabled. Finally we did find a couple that didn't use Flash, and the "I need a new computer, this one's sooooo slow" turned into "I need a better connection, this one's sooooo slow". Which was the point of the exercise.
But come on, web-slingers! We need a stampeding herd migrating away from Flash! Now!
Yes indeed. We used http://www.bandwidthplace.com/. SpeedOfMe gives about the same results, of course.
Ookla does actually have an insufficiently publicised nonflash version
My Chrome crapped itself refusing to install flash as a security risk, and rerouted me straight to the beta site. (was it Chrome?)
Windows 10 offered me to install the mobile version from Windows store on one occasion. Even the app is cell-phone shaped. Anyway, that doesn't rely on any browser and can be killed instantly.
I don't know what part exactly turned Flash down, if it was AVG Antivirus (hahahahah perhaps no) if it was actually Chrome, and what other part routed me to the beta site.
TLDR; I don't know WTF happened but the Flash version of Ookla was stomped and killed with fire ON SIGHT.
If you're using Firefox, many sites that want Flash will demand you enable it if the plugin is set to "Ask to activate," but if you set it to "Never activate," then and only then will you get the HTML5 version.
I'd much prefer it if FF acted like it didn't know what this "Flash" content type was when it's turned off rather than to tell the site, "Well sure I have the Flash plugin installed! It's just not enabled at the moment." That way I'd get the HTML5 version of a site if there is one, which of course is vastly better than enabling Flash, and it would save the "please enable Flash" prompt for sites that truly have no other option (looking at you, US National Weather Service). I probably still won't enable it (how will the webmasters learn if we don't teach them?), but it's good to have the choice and to know what the options are.
I believe Speedtest.net have actually moved away from flash (I was presented with the choice of legacy flash or something else last time I visited), but as has been said elsewhere speedof.me is better. It looks like dog poo but works well in a purely HTML5 interface.
Sure, the whole flash thing was like a drunken driver turning down a narrow alley with a flaming dumpster at the end, but it wasn't all bad. A whole lot of creative people expended their precious time to make really cool stuff like Hapland (needs flash). Lunacy of that sort is only now becoming possible with modern web code. Maybe.
There are hundreds or thousands of fine swf's out there that represent a fair bit of our early web culture, and as such ought not be forgotten. Kinda sad really.
Every year, at Halloween, we hang a semi-transparent white sheet in our living room window, then project a spooky pumpkin / graveyard animation at it, to let passing greb-finks children know that they can raid us for sweets.
The animation, of course, is done in... **cue moaning ghosts, rattling bones...** Flash!
What will the poor children do*, when I can no longer let them know that they can raid our home for sweets?!?!?
*Go to the dentist less, probably...
"The animation, of course, is done in... **cue moaning ghosts, rattling bones...** Flash!"
use ffmpeg or mencoder to convert it to something else?
either that or have a necromancer summon the Flash Player for ya, just for Halloween night. Muahahahahahaha!
(icon for the 2nd part, and because the original poster had it too)
Those same loading screens for content in HTML5 are going to be much better because its all bootstrap and semantic? The content is not going to vary in delivery size is it? If doing the same thing as 2001 takes about the same time or slightly longer due to the technology is that progress? Lets do animation for the web with 8bit colorspace on a linear timeline using pixels instead of vectors because #progress?
There's always Acrobat (reader)!
...and its loveable mid-meeting, 1/4 screen pop-ups, enabled by default, informing you that "A NEW VERSION OF ADOBE READER IS AVAILABLE! WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPGRADE NOW?"
Adobe produces to excellent products (I'm a big fan of Lightroom), but they could use a lesson in manners.
There is going to be a steady stream of flaws in the HTML5 rendering engine that will no doubt get built into systemd. It will get pwnd by someone using some specific background colour in their CSS, but will be closed as won't fix because users shouldn't use such a stupid colour anyway.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I run Firefox without Flash installed. Never had any problems. The 17% of the web must be shitty games, educational bullshit and other toss only 12yos want to look at. My kids say they have to have it installed then complain their machines run like crap. I take it off reboot and show them it's Flash - you makes your choices. Installing Flash is one I would avoid.
you have a choice, I don't. My kids do another school curriculum, after school, and 3/4 of the interactive stuff is flash-based, and they pull it from various projects. So we start off with firefox, I see the first "x" (all those blockers! ;) and we switch to... Internet Explorer (shudder). But they will move away from flash. Eventually.
Here's to hoping that they keep AIR and the standalone player around, or atleast open source the damn thing.
But the Adobe corporate leaderships are idiots. All of their big successes have basically been coincidences or at best skunk-works projects.
Flash is a damn good platform to develop stuff for. Trying to do some of the stuff you can do in Flash in HTML5 WebGL whatever, or a GUI toolkit, is just... pain and suffering in comparision.
No need for a plugin. I'm not referring to stuff that runs in a browser.
>Here's to hoping that they keep AIR and the standalone player around, or at least open source the damn thing.
They've already OS'ed what can be, the (3rd party) licensing is too complex to release all - according to a very reliable source back when Flex etc was gifted.
The AIR roadmap was published today also - that's supposedly not going anywhere - still a fairly large developer base for this, particularly on iOS ironically, but as Adobe aren't making any money from AIR (Animate is dreadful as an IDE) it's hard to see what they'll gain from investing properly in the SDK.
There's a lot of stuff that could be opensourced without any license issues - basically all of the runtime itself. There are codecs and other third-party stuff of course, but there should be enough to get a working Flash Player, just without support for some file formats and such. Maybe Stage3D would have to go as well (parts of it were developed by a third party IIRC, don't know about the license) but that's replacable.
Hell - to the best of my knowledge there isn't even a current open source version of avmplus, which is under a Mozilla license.
For protected SWF files of proprietary software which has long been abandoned, Adobe should offer a way to retrieve the contents so it can be rewritten. Using swfdec only gets you so far. Would say the same for Adobe Air files.
Otherwise it'll just be (hopefully) unplugged from the Internet.
It won't stop the script kiddies and virus/trojan peddlers from sending out "Your Flash install is out of date, please update to the latest [trojan riddled] version here." popups in dodgy adverts.
As part of it's death, Flash ought to self-destruct on any computer receiving the last update and leave behind a small piece of plug-in code that pops up "Flash is dead, this is a virus-ridden site don't go there" before automatically re-diverting to Adobe's page about Flash's retirement whenever a website with any flash content gets loaded.
They can't because there ARE things for which high-ups will reply, "But it's the ONLY way we can administer our stuff!" because people like Cisco (Identity Services Engine) don't offer alternatives on their dime (and since this is high-end enterprise stuff, they're expensive, too). You'd be cornering these firms who got the stuff long ago in good faith; they can't use Flash in an environment where they MUST use Flash.
I think Adobe has decided to kill off Flash they know they are fighting a losing battle.
Flash is and has been a buggy, security hole ridden pile of [insert word here] for many years.
"Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave,"
Sorry Adobe but I think you'll find that Macromedia may have had some involvement.
The announcement will be welcome news for security professionals and administrators, as it is one less attack vector to worry about.
A bit more than one..!! There are over a thousand with CVEs. Those, as Prof. Lehrer might have remarked, are all the ones that are known about at Havard... there many be many others but they have not been discavard.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html
Call me a pedat, then. Go on, you know you want to
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
