Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Petition to open source Flash

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 255 posts

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#51

Post by revelation »

wildbunny wrote: post #25
notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

Very narrow minded. Tens of thousands of games rely on flash, along with many movies and general history of the internet. Open souring it will preserve countless hours of lost work.

They are preserved, no ones making Commodores or GameBoys but I can play all those games just fine. Spin up a XP VM if you want the vintage Flash game experience.

(Hello downvotes? It's true, we preserve all of those things through virtual machines of one variety or another. The Flash plugin doesn't magically stop working because Adobe stops developing it.)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#52

Post by tbodt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #47
soylentcola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there still a standalone Flash player? (or at least, will the debug version work?) Haven't messed with Flash stuff in over a decade but I remember having a standalone player to play downloaded SWF files back in the day. No idea if there's anything roughly equivalent out there in its current incarnation. A sandboxed player application would go a long way toward the uses mentioned in this thread, no? I wonder when w…

> I wonder when we'll start seeing Flash emulators being developed to play back all that old content. http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/

Last commit was made in March 2016.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#53

Post by captainmuon »

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

Do you think Flash is insecure in principle, or in implementation? I think it is very much a problem of the implementation. I don't know if Adobe/Macromedia could have done better, or if the backwards compatibility requirements make it impossible to maintain, but I'd like to see for myself.

Anyway, you have no reason to be afraid. All mayor browsers are dropping support for plugins anyway. An open source flash player will most likely be used standalone, and not in a browser.

(I can't help but wonder if we are making a huge historical mistake here by the way. Because the Flash implementation was so bad, we were led to believe that plugins are bad per se. But at least in theory, it seems to me that the best architecture would be a minimal browser (just a layout engine), and everything as a plugin. Current browser are horrible monolithic giants, that only mega-corporations (and Mozilla ;-)) can maintain. That they are relatively secure is only due to the massive amounts of human-years that went into polishing and bug fixing in the recent decade.)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#54

Post by zaklaus »

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

I believe there should be an ability to create a secured container to run some Flash content, which isn't critical.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#55

Post by simion314 »

I can't understand why people are against open sourcing some proprietary code, why would it affect you? If you hate Flash that much you will have the opportunity to see the source code and confirm that is bad. All the open source reimplementation are incomplete, so with the opening up of Flash the open source ones could have a look (if license allows) and finish the reimplementation.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#56

Post by ben174 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #49
StevePerkins wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're all alpha-level, and will probably always be to Flash what ReactOS is to Windows.

Perhaps, but let's say Windows is gone tomorrow: wouldn't React OS gain a lot of traction given all the software for Windows, and perhaps get a spike of volunteers?

> let's say Windows is gone tomorrow

one can dream

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#57

Post by jarym »

So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying things....

But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML look nice you had little more than the dreaded 'blink' tag to work with.

If it weren't for Flash I doubt we'd have anywhere near as advanced CSS, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 bells and whistles that designers can actually use now.

I doubt Adobe will open source it though. They probably know there's a whole heap of other security issues in it that'll get found and exploited as soon as they release it. Your average user won't be able to patch fast enough!

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#58

Post by Ajedi32 »

mtgx wrote: post #5

Isn't Flash player's code super-messy by now? (a hint towards that could be all the vulnerabilities found for it every week). Open sourcing it would have to dramatically improve the code quality and in a relatively short period of time (2 years max), otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it (nor should they). Sounds like a daunting task, especially if no big organization/leader takes up the task of clea…

> otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it

Huh? Who said anything about browser vendors? This is about preserving history, not preserving features in web browsers. Browser vendors can and should continue to remove support for Flash regardless of whether it's open sourced or not.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#59

Post by Ajedi32 »

jarym wrote: post #57

So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying things.... But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML look nice you had little more than the dreaded 'blink' tag to work with. If it weren't for Flash I doubt we'd have anywhere near as advanced CSS, SVG,…

> They probably know there's a whole heap of other security issues in it that'll get found and exploited as soon as they release it.

So wait until 2020, after all major browsers have dropped support for it. No reason to worry about vulnerabilities in software that nobody's using in production anymore. If anyone still cares, they can always fix the security problems themselves.

Post reply on HN