When Adobe Stopped Flash Content From Running It Also Stopped A Chinese Railroad:
Adobe's Flash, the web browser plug-in that powered so very many crappy games, confusing interfaces, and animated icons of the early web like Homestar Runner is now finally gone, after a long, slow, protracted death. For most of us, this just means that some goofy webgame you searched for out of misplaced nostalgia will no longer run. For a select few in China, though, the death of Flash meant being late to work, because the city of Dalian in northern China was running their railroad system on it.Yes, a railroad, run on Flash, the same thing used to run "free online casinos" and knockoff Breakout games in mortgage re-fi ads.
[...] So, when Adobe finally killed Flash-based content from running, this Tuesday Dalian's railroad network found itself ground to a halt for 20 hours.
The railroad's technicians did get everything back up and running, but the way they did this is fascinating, too. They didn't switch the rail management system to some other, more modern codebase or software installation; instead, they installed a pirated version of Flash that was still operational. The knockoff version seems to be known as "Ghost Version."
This, along with installing an older version of the Flash player to work with the knockoff Flash server setup, "solved" the problem, and the railroad was back up and running.
(Emphasis preserved from original.)
Has anything like this ever happened where you work or worked?
Also at: Ars Technica; official's account (in Chinese).
Related/Previously:
Flash is Back in South Africa.
Related Stories
South African Government Releases Its Own Browser Just To Re-Enable Flash Support | Zdnet:
For some people, it's apparently easier to manage your own browser than port some web forms from Flash to HTML.
The South African Revenue Service [(SARS)] has released this week its own custom web browser for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms.
Flash Player reached its official end of life (EOL) on Dec. 31, 2020, when Adobe officially stopped supporting the software.
To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe also began blocking Flash content from playing inside the app starting January 12, with the help of a time-bomb mechanism.
As Adobe hoped, this last step worked as intended and prevented companies from continuing using the software, forcing many to update systems and remove the app.
As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets.
On Tuesday, Adobe unveiled Firefly, its new AI image synthesis generator. Unlike other AI art models such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, Adobe says its Firefly engine, which can generate new images from text descriptions, has been trained solely on legal and ethical sources, making its output clear for use by commercial artists. It will be integrated directly into Creative Cloud, but for now, it is only available as a beta.
Since the mainstream debut of image synthesis models last year, the field has been fraught with issues around ethics and copyright. For example, the AI art generator called Stable Diffusion gained its ability to generate images from text descriptions after researchers trained an AI model to analyze hundreds of millions of images scraped from the Internet. Many (probably most) of those images were copyrighted and obtained without the consent of their rights holders, which led to lawsuits and protests from artists.
Related:
Paper: Stable Diffusion "Memorizes" Some Images, Sparking Privacy Concerns
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Adobe Stock Begins Selling AI-Generated Artwork
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Adobe Goes After 27-Year Old 'Pirated' Copy of Acrobat Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS
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When Adobe Stopped Flash Content from Running it Also Stopped a Chinese Railroad
Adobe Has Finally and Formally Killed Flash
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday February 08 2021, @08:56AM (1 child)
A pirate version of software called "Ghost Version" to run a railroad? None for me, thanks, I'm driving!
of course, using flash to run a railroad in the first place....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2021, @04:44AM
Haha, the jokes on you, they use flash for their traffic lights too! So much for your driving.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 08 2021, @09:10AM (1 child)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-african-government-releases-its-own-browser-just-to-re-enable-flash-support/ [zdnet.com]
An internet search turns up dozens of sources that ran the above story. However, the ZDNet story seems to debunk all of them.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2021, @02:46PM
This turned out to be false, and later reports from Chinese media, with their balls in the hand of the big chinese brother, clarified...
(Score: 1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Monday February 08 2021, @09:10AM (2 children)
That area of China is not quite the same as saying "China."
We get offended when America is portrayed by the EU with goofy cartoons of an uneducated fat redneck on a scooter who thinks a 1/3lb burger is less than a 1/4 pounder, who lives in a trailer park with his mullet, and speaks a redneck version of English incomprehensible to a normal person. Indian people get offended when you say "Indians shit on the street and wipe their ass with their hand instead of toilet paper." They do - a minority of them living in uber-rural villages without running water or any toilets or sewer system.
So the area of China this happened in - it's the one where people don't know basic arithmetic and shit on the street, while burning wood in the winter because it's too rural to have heat. In fact, as someone who doesn't speak Mandarin, I can immediately tell by the their redneck accent where they're from, despite not knowing the language. That's where this railroad is from. It's actually a surprise there is any computer system running it at all, so it running in Flash is actually very modern for the area.
Now, here's an interesting tidbit, since my wife can read that Chinese propaganda blog linked in this post. They're making this political, and blaming the USA for shutting down their railroad. And they're not saying "Adobe disabled Flash because it's no longer supported." They're saying something akin to "USA now prohibits the use of Flash and is enforcing this on the world."
Then they go on how their amazing skilled staff and teamwork defeated this evil problem and how glorious their success was, and how highly praised they were by the authorities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2021, @09:17AM
Lemme guess, the railroad doesn't speak mandarin to your ear.
But of course uneducated fat rednecks on scooters who think a 1/3lb burger is less than a 1/4 pounder, who live in trailer parks with their mullet, and speak a redneck version of English incomprehensible to a normal person would do that.
Heck, a lot better than rewriting it in Golang.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday February 08 2021, @03:49PM
> And they're not saying "Adobe disabled Flash because it's no longer supported." They're saying something akin to "USA now prohibits the use of Flash and is enforcing this on the world."
Only as bad as all of the conspiracy nutjobs talking about Corona virus (e.g. POTUS).
Hum, I wonder if mentioning the orange one should now qualify for Godwinning.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday February 08 2021, @01:02PM (1 child)
A good friend of mine works for a large international insurance and they did exactly this. Well, they prepared in adwance and probably "fixed" the flash themselves as opposed to a pirated version, but in the end it's exactly the same setup for now.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2021, @06:55PM
Of course it happens.
Once people get a tool working well enough, they want to keep it going or for more people.
I've heard of
To be fair, the EOL thing is a new thing. The B-52 is a 50 year old design. I have hand tools made in 1901 that work better than many modern ones.
And I have battery operated tools that stop working & can't be repaired after 5 years of use. I have a thermal camera that is 5 years old and can't be used because the software updated & won't support the "old" one
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Monday February 08 2021, @01:29PM
TFS is so busy trying to celebrate software developers breaking stuff and mock the railroad operators that they don't explain the real issue. Did they have Flash configured to automatically update, thereby falling victim to the kill switch?
I don't normally use the Flash plugin, but just out of curiosity I did a quick search for an SWF file (hey, the old Heaven7 demo came with one!) and then opened it in Opera 12. Yep, still works. Must be I didn't receive the kill switch update. So sad.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 08 2021, @01:46PM
The story seems propaganda, made up.
The headline makes it sound like they ran their track SCADA system on flash.
The article details seem to imply instead of using Excel or google spreadsheet like most businesses, they did their scheduling and planning management phase stuff in a bespoke flash app.
It seems that a couple google spreadsheets later, the railroad would be right up and running again.... If they wanted... which they don't, as a propaganda issue.
Ironically, Club Penguin used flash and was discontinued; if someone was dumb enough to use club penguin as a corporate intra office chat network, its not really abode's fault, or club penguin's fault, when they shut down and every sane company out there is using IRC or slack or discord or some group chat supplier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2021, @08:44PM (1 child)
I think they forget that at one point Adobe was promoting a full stack platform called BlazeDS. UI that runs in Flash was called Flex iirc. It was cut from the same mold as Micros~1 XAML and QT/GTK's XML UIs. That was a couple years before HTML5 was ready, back around the same time as Silverlight.
I get that Flash is a shit platform, and I say that as somebody who developed with BlazeDS and Flex, but I think that Adobe is trying very hard to make us forget that they did try to make it a serious platform and now they've fucked over enterprise users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2021, @09:07AM