Facebook security lead wants Adobe to say when it's killing Flash


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To put it mildly, Adobe's Flash plugin has fallen from grace in recent years. BlackBerry, Google and other companies once thought it was crucial to the web, but you'll now find many of these outfits going out of their way to avoid and contain Flash in the names of both security and promoting true standards. Need further proof that it's a pariah? Just ask Facebook's new security chief, Alex Stamos. He's calling on Adobe to not only choose an "end-of-life date" for Flash, but to enable web browser "killbits" that shut it off for everyone at once. That's the only way to "disentangle the dependencies" and get everyone to move on to more secure technology like HTML5, he argues.

It's doubtful that Adobe will be quick to heed Stamos' request any time soon given how many sites still depend on Flash. He certainly has some evidence in his favor, though. Numerous security exploits (such as those used by Hacking Team) revolve around Flash, and it's no secret that the sandboxing features in some modern browsers are designed primarily to minimize the damage from Flash-related attacks and crashes. For Facebook, getting rid of Flash would eliminate many of the security threats against both you and the social network itself.

 

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so how will all the really old youtube videos work?

 

Definitely youtube, and not pornhub :p

The same way new ones do.

YouTube has had a non-flash embedding method for years, it's just up to sites to actually use it.

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Firefox now blocks Flash automatically

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Flash is the Justin Bieber of browser plugins: it's everywhere, it does nothing useful and every time you see it you want to smash a window. Yesterday, Facebook's head of security publicly opined that it was time for the platform to die, and just a day later, Mozilla's Mark Schmidt has joined in. In a tweet, Schmidt has announced that, as of the latest update, the Firefox browser will block Flash automatically. It looks as if the technology world has decided that if Adobe won't do the decent thing and kill it, then everyone else will just tool up and beat it to death themselves.

It may have been the best way to deliver video in the early days of the internet, but the rise of standards compliant technologies make Flash look obsolete. More importantly, however, Flash is riddled with holes, and it's often used as a beachhead for hackers to get comfortable inside your computer. Oftentimes, this is met with silence from Adobe, a point that The Register put to the company's Wiebke Lips. Her response was that there are "extensive efforts" in progress at the company to make the code harder to crack, although they're not yet ready to be pushed out to users.

2015 is becoming the year that Flash gets killed-off once and for all, with Google tweaking Chrome to "intelligently" block auto-playing adverts. In addition, YouTube, the site that was probably the plugin's biggest proponent, switched to HTML 5 to deliver video at the start of the year. It's likely that other notable holdouts will be pressured, either by these latest moves, the most recent security controversies or the Occupy Flash movement. Yup, there's a whole movement dedicated to eradicating this stuff from the web.

 

Oh, and should you want or, more likely, need to use Flash, you can reactivate the feature at your liberty by dipping into Firefox's settings menu.

 

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P.S. I will learn how to put that twitter post to here soon.

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I am still not sure HTML is good enough to replace all those flash games out there.

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so how will all the really old youtube videos work?

 

Definitely porntube, xtube, myporntube and oops. and not youtube  :p

 

FTFY

I am still not sure HTML is good enough to replace all those flash games out there.

My thoughts exactly, hundreds of online gaming sites run flash only.

 

 

I don't think flash will ever go away honestly, it will be "if you want to play this game, download flash from this weird downloadlink with tons of crapware"

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I am still not sure HTML is good enough to replace all those flash games out there.

 

 

FTFY

My thoughts exactly, hundreds of online gaming sites run flash only.

 

 

I don't think flash will ever go away honestly, it will be "if you want to play this game, download flash from this weird downloadlink with tons of crapware"

 

They may replace flash games with HTML5. 

 

See games based on HTML5: http://html5games.com/

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2015 is becoming the year that Flash gets killed-off once and for all, with Google tweaking Chrome to "intelligently" block auto-playing adverts. In addition, YouTube, the site that was probably the plugin's biggest proponent, switched to HTML 5 to deliver video at the start of the year. It's likely that other notable holdouts will be pressured, either by these latest moves, the most recent security controversies or the Occupy Flash movement. Yup, there's a whole movement dedicated to eradicating this stuff from the web.

 

:rolleyes: .... Google and Chrome is one big security hole. I do not think they should talk about other software.

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What a bunch of hysteria to cover their broader business interests.  While Flash should be depreciated for any new development (since Adobe has been a very bad steward of that purchase), but actively breaking older ones?  Most of the rabble against it is from the Apple crowd.  Sorry your platform sucks at it, have a fart app.

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What does Apple have to do with it? A large portion of devices accessing the internet today just don't have Flash, relying on it locks content away from those users.

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