Flash is now officially dead for real

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Flash is now officially dead for real

Are you sad and/or angry Flash is gone?
	Yes
	No
	This arouses no special feelings in me OP
	Goku

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Bula Vinaka posted:

It's a real rear end in a top hat move from Adobe to timebomb their code. It is up to the individual user to decide whether or not code will run on their machines, not anyone else.

It's been a known security hole for a decade that's never been adequately fixed to prevent exploits. Discontinuing the software and deactivating it from existing computers is keeping the average person safe. If you'd paid money for flash you might have a point, but it was a free product.

If you wanna run flash, rather than installing an old version I'd recommend making a windows VM and installing in inside the VM. Windows includes that for free, you can use windows sandbox or a full persistent VM at zero cost. Install the most recent version and just set the date back to 2019 so it runs.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 01:46

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:08

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

frumpykvetchbot posted:

Is sandboxing something so all it can do is make pixels in a box so very hard?

Yes, particularly if you're trying to do it after the fact. Sandboxing everything is also worse for performance, and while that doesn't matter much today it did during flash's heyday. Back in the day when a website wanted to load a java applet it was like ugggggh fine because your PC was gonna slow down for the next little while. So for most of flash's life, particularly for multimedia stuff, the simple and insecure nature of flash was an advantage.

quote:

They had so many years to fix this stuff.

Yeah but nobody wants to use flash these days, irregardless of the vulnerabilities or anything else. There are better, more modern replacements for everything flash does. So nobody was buying fireworks or other adobe software to make new flash poo poo.

Adobe *could* have been working on something like ruffle for the last 6 years. But they aren't gonna pay for developers to do stuff just to support old newgrounds games. The professional internet has moved on from flash.

quote:

What kinds of OS hooks did Flash based malware exploit?

Nothing weird, same sort of flaws that other software has for security holes, including broswers themselves. Firefox & chrome have had exploits in the past that allowed people to pwn your computer just from loading a webpage & scripts. But way fewer of them than flash.

The difference is that flash likely had some really poorly designed stuff at the very bottom from a security perspective. It's really hard to re-do the foundations of a software program without just re-doing the whole program. And in the case of flash, which is a program that runs other programs, doing drastic changes in ways that don't break compatibility is hard.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2021 02:50

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Flash is now officially dead for real