Petition Asks Adobe to Open-Source Flash for the Sake of Internet History

Megalith

Megalith

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Finnish developer Juha Lindstedt has started a petition on GitHub asking Adobe to release Flash into the hands of the open-source community: the goal is to create a lighter version of the plugin (or, at least, a tool to convert SWF and FLA files) so older Flash content can be experienced indefinitely. While thousands have already signed in favor of this, others say that Flash should be killed off due to security concerns.

The developer wants Adobe to open-source Flash or parts of its technology so the open-source community could take on the job of supporting a minimal version of the Flash plugin or at least create a tool to accurately convert old SWF and FLA files to modern HTML5, canvas data, or WebAssembly code. The entire purpose of this project is to make sure a large chunk of archived web content, movies, or games doesn't die off in 2020, or in later years as browsers evolve, and the Flash plugin becomes noncompatible with modern tech.
 
Thats one thing I hate of the digital age, so much content (old sites, games, tools, programs, etc) dont have a proper way to be preserved and worse, companies and sometimes, creators, act against these type of preservation idea/requests.
 
If this were to get say GPL2'd, this would be fucking awesome! We could fix the security issues and still have awesome Flash Games!
 
I support the idea only if the code is released 5 years after Flash support ends. That should give enough time to purge it from most active websites. A conversion tool to go from Flash to HTML5 should be released now, if Adobe is really serious about getting rid of Flash.
 
No no no !NO. Open it up after say 10years of it being dead

Right now everyone has flash. If the src is made available when they kill it the hackers will make dodgy sites immediately as there is going to be soo many flaws. There will be no way to patch these machines.

In 10years time when flash is no longer installed on people's machines then sure, FOSS it
 
grtitan said:
Thats one thing I hate of the digital age, so much content (old sites, games, tools, programs, etc) dont have a proper way to be preserved and worse, companies and sometimes, creators, act against these type of preservation idea/requests.
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Spidey329 said:
Pretty sure the old tech can be preserved on VM's running the older OS/browser/plugin.
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...its always interesting when at first adobe wanted flash everywhere, complained that apple didnt use it. Now some years later, its aaah we are going to drop it and leave you with no recourse to play old files. Interesting that a person with an old record player from 50 years ago can play old tunes and songs, but someone with the latest digital technology may not be able to play a newer digital file.

The best idea is to make a re-coding app available. Why dont billion dollar companies think like the people that they used to serve?

Oh well, still got three years.
 
ml_paladin888 said:
If it was worth hanging on to, it would have been ported and preserved
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...maybe, but its hard to know what "everyone" wants. Many times obscure not well known stuff comes out and everyone starts telling how much they liked it when it first came out. We have the smithsonian and internet archive but also billions more folks making content. Just better to have some conversion available then hope that it was saved somewhere by somebody else.
 
There are some significant differences between Flash! (.FLA exported to .SWF) and HTML5... Flash had layering that it could load and unload from memory, basically like stacking sever sheets of paper... , adding/removing different sheets/presentation material in the stack... Pre-loaders for graphics/sound... Actionscript (kind of resembles C++)... references to external files (part of the problem, since .EXE's are included in this). Most folks equate FLASH with VIDEO, and say HTML5 will do that... It goes far deeper.
Does anyone remember Shockwave? .... This is from back when Macromedia Inc. was running the show... and before Adobe took it over.
 
ml_paladin888 said:
If it was worth hanging on to, it would have been ported and preserved
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You've never experienced getting rid of something only to realise some time later on that you could now have very good use for it?
At work we had a huge amount of documents in Word 4.0 format, unreadable with Word 95 (and later)...
 
Spidey329 said:
Pretty sure the old tech can be preserved on VM's running the older OS/browser/plugin.
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Exactly. People are panicking as if flash will never be viewable again. It can be done in VMs, handled as quarantined environments. Dumping the source for flash this soon, even if Adobe were willing to play along with the petition, would be the worst possible outcome. It's obvious they aren't going to make a conversion tool because it'd be a nightmare with no money to be made.

Olle P, the difference there is that old word documents can contain valuable information. Flash? Not so much.
 
Yeah I vote kill it. Some people are still not going to upgrade and "source code" in the wild is going to make those people "low hanging fruit" for hackers.
 
Anybody know of a site that lists famous flash based hacks. Would be interesting to know how bad it has been before updates. Cant find one......
 
Never mind..........wonder why it took sooo long, seeing how long its been a real problem, I dont think I will "really" miss it....



https://www.recordedfuture.com/top-vulnerabilities-2015/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3002...dobes-flash-is-a-hackers-favorite-target.html

https://www.recode.net/2015/1/20/11...sonys-hackers-break-in-zero-day-vulnerability

In a 2011 attack, later attributed to China’s People’s Liberation Army, malicious code was inserted into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file sent to employees of RSA, the security division of storage and IT giant EMC. The hackers took advantage of a Zero-Day vulnerability in Adobe’s video and animation software Flash [https://blogs.rsa.com/anatomy-of-an-attack/]

....... [https://www.wired.com/2014/12/fbi-metasploit-tor/]

One of those tricks was a lean 35-line Flash application. It worked because Adobe’s Flash plug-in can be used to initiate a direct connection over the Internet, bypassing Tor and giving away the user’s true IP address. It was a known issue even in 2006, and the Tor Project cautions users not to install Flash.

2015
june-july ..........There is no question that Adobe Flash Player is a major target of attackers. This Wednesday will mark the seventh time in as many months that Adobe has issued an emergency update to fix a zero-day flaw in Flash Player......The flaw was disclosed publicly over the weekend after hackers broke into and posted online hundreds of gigabytes of data from Hacking Team, a controversial Italian company that’s long been accused of helping repressive regimes spy on dissident groups.


 
Megalith said:
Finnish developer Juha Lindstedt has started a petition on GitHub asking Adobe to release Flash into the hands of the open-source community: the goal is to create a lighter version of the plugin (or, at least, a tool to convert SWF and FLA files) so older Flash content can be experienced indefinitely. While thousands have already signed in favor of this, others say that Flash should be killed off due to security concerns.

The developer wants Adobe to open-source Flash or parts of its technology so the open-source community could take on the job of supporting a minimal version of the Flash plugin or at least create a tool to accurately convert old SWF and FLA files to modern HTML5, canvas data, or WebAssembly code. The entire purpose of this project is to make sure a large chunk of archived web content, movies, or games doesn't die off in 2020, or in later years as browsers evolve, and the Flash plugin becomes noncompatible with modern tech.
Click to expand...


It'll never happen.

Everyone only thinks of Flash in terms of how they see or use it. But Flash is a mainstay of server and appliance management tools throughout the IT Industry, no way it's going away anytime soon, and no way Adobe will open-source it and Adobe doesn't really care if you use it for your entertainment content. Adobe does care that CISCO, NetApp, EMX, Intel, Dell, Hitachi, and a dozen other vendors use Flash based management tools for their platforms.

Open-Sourcing Flash is a pipe dream for now.
 
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beatyas said:
Does anyone remember Shockwave?
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Shockwave is still an active project.

and of course all flash cannot simply be converted to HTML5... you may have better luck getting Java to implement some sorta emulation within their pile of crap...
 
lcpiper said:
It'll never happen.

Everyone only thinks of Flash in terms of how they see or use it. But Flash is a mainstay of server and appliance management tools throughout the IT Industry, no way it's going away anytime soon, and no way Adobe will open-source it and Adobe doesn't really care if you use it for your entertainment content. Adobe does care that CISCO, NetApp, EMX, Intel, Dell, Hitachi, and a dozen other vendors use Flash based management tools for their platforms.

Open-Sourcing Flash is a pipe dream for now.
Click to expand...

.........but since most of the management tools are for flash based sites, once flash is sunsetted there will be no or a lesser need for management of flash pages.
 
ml_paladin888 said:
If it was worth hanging on to, it would have been ported and preserved
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Plenty of projects, tools, pages, etc served their reason to exist, but as stated, without preservation, there is nothing to go back to and if anyone ever wanted to revisit for whatever reason they pleased they just don't have that option.

I guess since that concept is not important to you, it shouldn't be for others either.
 
Kill it with fire. Just kill it completely already and be done with it.
 
Khahhblaab said:
.........but since most of the management tools are for flash based sites, once flash is sunsetted there will be no or a lesser need for management of flash pages.
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What do you mean by flash based sites?

The management tools don't connect to web sites, they are flash based tools that allow you to manage your hardware. For instance, NetApp's OnCommand utility allows me to manage my NetApp Storage system. I use it to configure network interfaces, carve out storage volumes, share CIFS, present NFS Exports to VMWare for VM datastores, and iSCSI LUNs for block storage to servers. With the UCS Manager I do the same kinds of things to manage our UCS Blade Server chassis and servers. I don't go to any web sites with them, we aren't even connected to the internet.

So I don't think I know what you mean.

Flash is not going away any time soon.
 
grtitan said:
Plenty of projects, tools, pages, etc served their reason to exist, but as stated, without preservation, there is nothing to go back to and if anyone ever wanted to revisit for whatever reason they pleased they just don't have that option.

I guess since that concept is not important to you, it shouldn't be for others either.
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I suppose, if I had something worthwhile to present to people, I'd find a way to do that.
 
lcpiper said:
What do you mean by flash based sites?

The management tools don't connect to web sites, they are flash based tools that allow you to manage your hardware. For instance, NetApp's OnCommand utility allows me to manage my NetApp Storage system. I use it to configure network interfaces, carve out storage volumes, share CIFS, present NFS Exports to VMWare for VM datastores, and iSCSI LUNs for block storage to servers. With the UCS Manager I do the same kinds of things to manage our UCS Blade Server chassis and servers. I don't go to any web sites with them, we aren't even connected to the internet.

So I don't think I know what you mean.

Flash is not going away any time soon.
Click to expand...

.........are we on the same page? Are we talking about adobe flash software or semiconductor solid state flash memory? I was referring to websites that use adobe flash for multimedia content and the pages that they are on. You seem to be talking about storage devices. If you are talking about oncommand utility, which I have no experience of, it should be relatively easy to rewrite it<IMHO> . I say that because there doesnt seem to be anything proprietary about using flash as the gui in a utility. If you can point me to an application that uses flash in a way that is so specific that it cant be done a different way, you would be adding information to my tool box. Something I was unaware of.

thanks for the other references, I didnt know about them before.
 
Khahhblaab said:
.........are we on the same page? Are we talking about adobe flash software or semiconductor solid state flash memory? I was referring to websites that use adobe flash for multimedia content and the pages that they are on. You seem to be talking about storage devices. If you are talking about oncommand utility, which I have no experience of, it should be relatively easy to rewrite it<IMHO> . I say that because there doesnt seem to be anything proprietary about using flash as the gui in a utility. If you can point me to an application that uses flash in a way that is so specific that it cant be done a different way, you would be adding information to my tool box. Something I was unaware of.

thanks for the other references, I didn't know about them before.
Click to expand...

No we aren't on the same page because although Flash is used for web pages/web sites, it's also used for programing management tools in the IT realm. I just don't think you are aware of it. That is part of the problem here. Flash has many uses and many people don't know it. So they only see this issue from the perspective of what they know, which for many people, is an incomplete picture.

The IT world needs Flash and uses Flash every single day to manage IT infrastructure resources and it has nothing to do with going to a website on the internet. That is why I am saying that this guy's petition isn't going to happen, and why I say that Flash isn't going away anytime soon.
 
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