TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentral TechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      E.tv: ‘We know we must vacate broadband spectrum bands’

      29 June 2022

      Eskom warns recovery from strike chaos could take weeks

      29 June 2022

      Eskom offers workers 7% increase: sources

      29 June 2022

      E-commerce is killing shopping malls – but, curiously, not in South Africa

      29 June 2022

      Eskom employees returning to work

      29 June 2022
    • World

      Napster plots crypto comeback

      29 June 2022

      Pictures: Chinese spacecraft acquires images of entire planet of Mars

      29 June 2022

      Arm aims for leg-up in smartphone games with new chip tech

      29 June 2022

      Warnings of a final bitcoin ‘washout’

      29 June 2022

      Sony launches into PC gaming hardware

      29 June 2022
    • In-depth

      The great crypto crash: the fallout, and what happens next

      22 June 2022

      Goodbye, Internet Explorer – you really won’t be missed

      19 June 2022

      Oracle’s database dominance threatened by rise of cloud-first rivals

      13 June 2022

      Everything Apple announced at WWDC – in less than 500 words

      7 June 2022

      Sheryl Sandberg’s ad empire leaves a complicated legacy

      2 June 2022
    • Podcasts

      How your organisation can triage its information security risk

      22 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E06 – ‘Apple Silicon’

      15 June 2022

      The youth might just save us

      15 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E05 – ‘Nvidia: The Green Goblin’

      8 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E04 – ‘The story of Intel – part 2’

      1 June 2022
    • Opinion

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022

      Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

      13 June 2022

      A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

      19 May 2022

      From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

      19 April 2022

      How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

      8 April 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»Opinion»Alistair Fairweather»Adobe Flash: dead man walking

    Adobe Flash: dead man walking

    Alistair Fairweather By Alistair Fairweather20 July 2015
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email

    Alistair-Fairweather-180-profileIt’s installed on a billion computers around the globe, but before the end of this decade Adobe Flash will be dead. After two decades of ubiquity, the Flash platform is finally collapsing under its own weight.

    Flash Player used to be everywhere. You used it to watch videos on YouTube, you used it to play online games, whole sites were built in it. Before 2010 there were very few other ways to display animated content on the Web, and none of them had the reach of Flash.

    Now Flash seems at best an afterthought and at worst a liability. So far this year alone, Adobe has scrambled to patch six major security holes in the platform. These are not theoretical holes, these are live vulnerabilities that were (and still are) being used by hacker groups to attack millions of computers.

    The most recent vulnerabilities were revealed by an unlikely source and in a wryly amusing way. Hacking Team, an odious hackers-for-hire firm based in Milan, was itself hacked. Oops. Four hundred gigabytes of its corporate data was then distributed on the Internet.

    This data has proved a treasure trove for what security geeks call “zero-day exploits”, particularly in Flash. One of these bugs was described in Hacking Team’s internal communications as “the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years”. It can be used to override PC functions, change the value of objects and reallocate memory.

    This is not a new phenomenon. Adobe has been frantically patching Flash for the last few years. The platforms huge install base is a curse as much as it is a blessing, because it turns the Flash Player plug-in into a red-hot target for anyone seeking to infiltrate a computer via the Internet.

    Most of the people who use Flash do not even realise they are using it. It’s the ultimate Trojan horse, constantly running in the background, merrily executing code through compromised advertising banners and stealing people’s data en masse.

    This problem has become so acute in the last few weeks that Mozilla has blocked Flash Player by default in the latest version of its Firefox browser. Since Firefox updates automatically, tens of millions of Adobe’s customers will simply disappear from its radar in the next few weeks.

    And things are only going to get worse. Alex Stamos, the new head of security at Facebook, has publicly challenged Adobe to set an “end of life date” for Flash. Like most other security professionals, he sees no future in which Flash can be relied upon. And Stamos cannot be easily dismissed. Flash may have a billion customers, but Facebook has nearly two billion and counting.

    A large part of the problem stems from the fact that Flash is both proprietary and entirely closed source. That means the only people thinking about Flash’s security work for Adobe. Compared to the (literally) millions of skilled hackers, they are a fart against a hurricane.

    The rest of the Web’s plumbing uses open standards like HTML, CSS, SSL and PGP. These are far from perfect, but they have millions of dedicated geeks grooming and shepherding them. Flash’s whole approach is outdated, which explains why it is unable to keep up with the rest of the Web.

    Time to put it out of its misery
    Time to put it out of its misery

    Case in point: YouTube officially deprecated Flash in January this year. All viewers now use the HTML5 player that is both cross-browser compatible and almost universally available without any additional download.

    All of the things Flash was once good at — animation, interactivity, audio, video — now have safer and more reliable alternatives that are built right into modern browsers. The only things using Flash at any real scale anymore are advertising banners and in-browser games like Farmville.

    In 2010, Steve Jobs wrote a now famous memo explaining why Apple would not be including support for Flash on its iOS platform. In a nutshell: Flash was closed, unreliable, unsafe, bloated and a battery hog.

    At the time he was derided by Adobe and its lackeys for dismissing one of the Web’s most important technologies. Five years later, his criticisms seem prescient. Rather than Apple caving in and supporting Flash, the rest of the world followed Apple.

    Even Adobe itself seems to realise Flash’s days are numbered. In the last five years, it has invested in tools and systems that work with HTML5, the new standard for Web video and animation.

    But if history is anything to go by, Adobe will never take the plunge itself — it will have to be pushed. One by one, the major Web browsers will begin blocking it by default and eventually banning it outright.

    But Adobe will ride this burning platform right down into the icy sea before it relinquishes its last toehold in the Web. Let’s all leave the platform before it gets to that stage.

    Adobe Adobe Flash Alistair Fairweather Firefox Flash Google Hacking Team Mozilla Mozilla Firefox
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleSpike in identity theft
    Next Article Why Adobe Flash must die

    Related Posts

    Google Cloud customers will learn their Gmail carbon footprint

    28 June 2022

    Apple, Android phones hacked by Italian spyware

    24 June 2022

    Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

    21 June 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Think herding cats is tricky? Try herding a cloud

    29 June 2022

    How your business can help hybrid workers effectively

    28 June 2022

    Hands off our satellite spectrum!

    27 June 2022
    Opinion

    Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

    21 June 2022

    Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

    13 June 2022

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.