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Back in August Adobe reversed its decision to stop offering an NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux and promised that version 23 would come Penguinistas' way real soon now.
At the time the decision was greeted with surprise, because Adobe had not thought to update Flash for Linux since 2012's version 11.2. But the company decided that Linux users deserved a security upgrade to the infamously hole-ridden product.
It turns out the company fibbed, because it's now delivered version 24 of the plugin to Linux users, making this a thirteen-version jump between releases*.
That's the same version number offered to Windows and Mac users, but the new Linux version lacks features found on those other platforms. Linux users willing to put up with almost-certainly-insecure** will therefore have to put up with missing 3D acceleration from GPUs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:51PM
Flash was, and in some ways still is, the "easy" way to embed video in web pages. There's still a lot of content out there, lazy static website devs, clueless bespoke live video solutions, and some enterprises that hold back browser updates 5+ years for their idea of "security," such that Flash is basically the only solution to reach that ready to be fossilized enterprise, which is still paying millions a year for their video solutions and demanding they be done compatible with IE -4.0 on their Windows NT and some 98 (fully updated with service pack 2, of course) systems.
I "kept up" with Adobe Flash updates in detail for a period of about 6 months, every single "security" update they pushed during that time was, at its core, DRM shell games. Some hackers in Eastern Europe would open up BBC content so it could be viewed out of region, so Adobe would push one of a dozen or so proprietary scheme switches out as the "latest security patch," and break the hackers decoding scheme. Two weeks later, the hackers would figure out what Adobe had done and release another decoder, two weeks after that, Adobe would push another "security patch."
TLDR: Flash security updates are mostly not about protecting the home user's PC, they're about changing the locks for DRM protected content from big providers who detect that their video is being consumed by persons not authorized to do so.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:58PM
The actual security exploits in flash are pretty dumb and amateurish too. Such as using a signed integer as the scene index without a lower bounds check.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:26PM
Is there yet a workable solution for authoring and playing vector animations that involves no Adobe products?
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:59PM
teevee ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:38PM
Well, there is Gnash, which despite not having a release in over four years is still seeing some development: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnash.git/log/ [gnu.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:56PM
For some fucked up reason Netflix uses silverlight
Seriously, WTF
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 31 2016, @10:14PM
To the Empire theme:
DRM DRM DRM DRM drm DRM DRM drm DRM
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:47PM
browser vendors still don't support playing rtsp directly in browser via html5 video. they're too busy arguing about whether they are socialist enough or how better to screw their users. so surveillance cams use flash or windows plugins or you can needlessly transcode each stream with ffmpeg, etc. that's fine with a cam or two at 720p. not so much with 16 cams at 1440p.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 31 2016, @10:16PM
>not so much with 16 cams at 1440p.
Oh, come on, you can co-locate NUCs, one per 4 cameras, and have them do the transcode for you.
Yeah, it sucks.
🌻🌻 [google.com]