Hallelujah
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 …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 27th July 2017 07:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
BTWholesale Speedtest
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".
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 08:08 GMT Lotaresco
Re: Dear Adobe
"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.
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Thursday 27th July 2017 11:42 GMT Antron Argaiv
Re: Dear Adobe
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.
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Monday 31st July 2017 03:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dear Adobe
"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!!
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 08:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How many millions will the NHS
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.
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 14:02 GMT Glenturret Single Malt
Re: How many millions will the NHS
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.
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 15:59 GMT Adam 52
Re: How many millions will the NHS
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.
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 09:18 GMT Richard 22
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
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 12:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 16:59 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Message from PHB to Web Team
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 17:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 08:33 GMT LewisRage
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 17:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why wait?
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 22:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why wait?
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?
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 06:50 GMT TRT
Re: Why wait?
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 17:21 GMT Dwarf
Bit academic
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.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 17:31 GMT Palpy
Webmasters, get your act together!
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!
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 19:35 GMT Palpy
Re: Webmasters, get your act together!
Yes indeed. We used http://www.bandwidthplace.com/. SpeedOfMe gives about the same results, of course.
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Tuesday 25th July 2017 17:52 GMT John H Woods
Re: Webmasters, get your act together!
Ookla does actually have an insufficiently publicised nonflash version
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