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Newgrounds is Creating a Flash Emulator

posted by martyb on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Flash-is-dead,-long-live-Ruffle! dept.

rigrig writes:

Games and animation site Newgrounds announced it is working on a way to play Flash content via emulation.
Ruffle is an open source Adobe Flash Player emulator written in Rust. It targets desktop and the web using Web Assembly, so unlike the plugin (which is scheduled for end-of-life in 2020), any security issues would be issues with the web browser itself.

While the creation of new Flash content instead of modern technology seems a Bad Idea, this Soylentil for one would be quite happy to replay some of the classics (which stopped working when the plugin was banned from his system).

[ Ed Note: the source article claims that open source is the reason why there won't be any vulnerabilities: "For anyone who is concerned about Flash's reputation for security - this project is entirely open source and any security issues would be issues with the web browser itself, whereas the traditional Flash plugin was a closed system that created unique opportunities for exploits." - Fnord666]

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  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday August 26 2019, @02:55PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Monday August 26 2019, @02:55PM (#885658) Journal

    If Adobe owns the property rights to all ActionScript, couldn't they shut this down?

    Early on, the SWF specification was intended for use by authors of tools that output SWF, not by reimplementations of Flash Player. But in April 2008, Adobe announced it was dropping the ban on third-party SWF players as part of the "Open Screen Project" initiative.

    Also, Google and Mozilla have been pushing hard to kill Flash, what's to prevent them from blocking this too?

    Because it's not Adobe Flash Player. It's a different program that happens to read the same file format, and it runs in a virtual machine that the browser publisher controls. If an SWF player can escape, so can malware, and that's something a browser publisher both wants to fix and has power to fix.

    Lastly, why wouldn't Adobe have ported to Web Assembly themselves? [...] Was it not profitable?

    Bingo. Requiring SWF authors to retire their paid-for copies of Flash MX or Flash CS in favor of annual licenses of Adobe Creative Cloud brings in more revenue.

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