back to article Another day, yet another emergency Adobe Flash patch. Because that's how we live now

The new year hasn't been a pleasant one for Adobe: the Silicon Valley firm has scrambled to close yet more serious security holes in its Flash player. Last week the Photoshop biz rushed out a patch for a critical flaw in Flash that miscreants were exploiting in the wild to hijack victims' computers. Today, a new update has …

  1. edge_e
    Facepalm

    Fucking

    Lame

    Ass

    Security

    Hole

  2. btrower

    Given that Adobe's Flash is purpose built to be a vector for malicious activities, it is hardly surprising that it is being used that way. When it works entirely as designed it is evil.

  3. ThomH

    Is this incompetence or vigilance?

    Like most people my instinctive feeling about anything from Adobe is that it's probably a kludge of twenty-year old source code and some flimsy hacked-together OS abstraction layer that is guaranteed to be at least ten times slower than the native alternatives. But is that just prejudice?

    Not that it matters. Now that Netflix streams without plugins to both IE and Safari I'm sans-Flash. That was the last thing.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is this incompetence or vigilance?

      I guess (OK, you should never assume or guess) that the only way it can work (from concept) is to allow stupid things to happen like let the user own the process as admin. MS also fell in this trap when they disregarded the Internet (in the 90's) as a no go and are still getting caught out.

      The thing is MS windows (once, I dunno about now) was designed for one user - admin - and all software shops using 'programmed' programmers reading MS docs followed that premise. They are all now struggling to 'unpipe' the spaghetti' mess as they don't know what the fuck they done in the first place.

  4. Crazy Operations Guy

    I wish they'd change their update method

    Why can't they use the update mechanism built into the browser, similar to how normal extensions / add-ons update?

    I loathe updating flash since it requires to use a separate executable to check for an update, then you have to go to their website (and uncheck the box to download whatever piece of shovelware they are offering this week)and download a full executable, then when the executable is done running, you have to restart your browsers whether or not flash was running at the time or not.

    Although its not nearly as bad as the JRE... But that's like saying getting kicked in the leg isn't as bad as getting kicked in the face.

    1. DaddyHoggy

      Re: I wish they'd change their update method

      I've got 200 PCs in my lab. Have yet to find a way of automating the install. Although the registry hack to stop the shovelware auto tick does work.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I wish they'd change their update method

        I've got 200 PCs in my lab. Have yet to find a way of automating the install.

        Grab the shovelware-free MSI installer and deploy via a group policy. Disable the auto update and you'll be responsible for updating the computers from then on.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I wish they'd change their update method

        Use a ninite with runasspc. That what I do.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Adobe INNER TUBE!

    That'll need a shit load of patches too.

  6. Maty

    And to think a few years back people were building websites based entirely on Flash.

  7. David Austin

    Why Won't it Die?

    Seriously, please - can we just put the fucker out of it's misery?

    Thanks to Jobs putting his foot down on iOS, most sites proved they can work without flash.

    I think the worst Sin Microsoft did with Windows 8 was baking flash into Internet Explorer: Just when we were at the point of beginning to get rid of it.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Why Won't it Die?

      "The slow death of Adobe Flash has been hastened — YouTube, which used the platform as the standard way to play its videos, has dumped Flash in favor of HTML5 for its default web player. The site will now use HTML5 video as standard in Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8, and in beta versions of Firefox. "

      - http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flash-for-html5-video-default

  8. Rick Giles
    Linux

    Flash is dead to me anyway

    Once they said that 11.2.x was going to be the last version for Linux, they ceased to exist.

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