Adobe Now Shows Alerts in Windows 10 To Uninstall Flash Player (bleepingcomputer.com) 61
With the Flash Player officially reaching the end of life tomorrow, Adobe has started to display alerts on Windows computers recommending that users uninstall Flash Player. From a report: When Flash Player is installed, it creates a scheduled task named 'Adobe Flash Player PPAPI Notifier' that executes the following command: "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil32_32_0_0_465_pepper.exe" -update pepperplugin. When this command is executed, it is now displaying an alert thanking users for using Adobe Flash Player and then recommending that they uninstall the program due to its looming end of life. Further reading: Adobe Flash is about to die, but classic Flash games will live on.
Creepy (Score:1)
That a company can force a message onto your PC without your permission is unnerving. And creepy. What next? Are they going to force ads onto your machine whenever they feel like it?
About the only place left not to have ads shoved in your face is your dreams [youtube.com].
Re: Creepy (Score:1)
Re:Creepy (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if you have their product on your comp, but are offended when said product warns you that it will be obsolete with the New Year and should be uninstalled? Really?
Re:Creepy (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean without your permission? Adobe can't do anything until you install software on your computer from them that is running and can produce a notification.
About the only place left not to have ads shoved in your face is your dreams [youtube.com].
I mean if you're having adverts shoved in your face then maybe you should stop installing advert in your face software... It's not difficult.
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What do you mean without your permission? Adobe can't do anything until you install software on your computer from them that is running and can produce a notification.
About the only place left not to have ads shoved in your face is your dreams [youtube.com].
I mean if you're having adverts shoved in your face then maybe you should stop installing advert in your face software... It's not difficult.
Absolutely. This is the collateral baggage associated with the installation of software for some expected benefit.
To the grandparent's sentiment, though, many new products only come loaded with some IOT smart connectivity that allows involuntary connectivity to the original manufacturer, whether or not you ever use the feature(s).
Alternatives to smart appliances are shrinking, but as the kids say, who are you to worry if you voluntarily carry around a tracking device?
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Perhaps you can tell me how to uninstall all trace of Flash, because I see nothing in 'add/remove programs'. The app to configure flash is still in the control panel, and I keep getting security updates for flash player.
Maybe the next cumulative update from MS will take care of it all, but I doubt it.
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Are you serious? You're asking how to uninstall Flash in the comments of an article that is about the Flash uninstaller? Just run the damn exe in the directory listed in TFS (as administrator) and poof. Flash gone.
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Listen, kiddo, obviously the very first thing I did was to go to that directory to run that program. It's not there. In fact, that directory is not there. So I was asking if maybe someone knew another way.
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Submerse in salt water for 28 days, and it will be deflashed.
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Excellent! Thanks for the tip! ;-)
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You could have opened with that.
So you're one of those people who intentionally blocks windows updates and then complains when something doesn't work, or are you on a corporate machine? Because that software was pushed to all Windows PCs in October and will be pushed to WSUS in the coming month.
https://www.catalog.update.mic... [microsoft.com]
Or you could Google "Uninstall Flash Player" the first link of which takes you to an MS KB on this update, and the second to Adobe's website with instructions to manually download and
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Maybe the next cumulative update from MS will take care of it all, but I doubt it.
Yes, there's a microsoft update scheduled for the January 12th patch Tuesday that will remove their IE/Edge components, which will take the control panel away with it.
The update was made available to IT administrators back in October, so if you would like to install it in advance, you can get it from the update catalog:
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/search.aspx?q=4577586 [microsoft.com]
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Even Hillary knows that, you use BleachBit to get rid of shit on your computer. It has a specific cleaner for Flash among other thing. https://www.bleachbit.org/feat... [bleachbit.org]
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About the only place left not to have ads shoved in your face is your dreams
First off, you get the message only AFTER you install the software, and second what you call an "ad" is actually a reminder from the author (Adobe) to remove their free product (Flash) because they are ending support and it could become a vector for hacks/attacks if left on your computer.
Did you find update alerts from Flash equally annoying? It's literally the same process encouraging you to remove the software that used to encourage you to update it.
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>yesclicks EULAs
>i didn't give permission
That File Path (Score:1, Troll)
- "C:\" Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
- "Windows" why are 3rd party files stored in a sub directory of the system? Is Flash part of Windows? Here lies one fundamental security problem of Windows
- "Macromed" haha that's the funniest part, "Macromedia" truncated to 8 chars because of backward compatibilty to the 80s
I seriously don't understand why people and companies still use this trash OS in 2020. I bet t
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Yes, why wouldn't they be? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with them and it sure as hell is easier for someone who has used windows in the past to understand this concept than to change it for no reason. I mean as long as your file systems are NTFS you're more than welcome to create links and embed folders and whatever, but why do you want to change something that doesn't affect anyone?
"Windows" why are 3rd party files stored in a sub directory of the system? Is Flash part of Windows? Here lies one fundamental security problem of Windows
Yes. The answer is yes. Flash is a part of Windows as much as any system program on unix is a part of that program call
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"Windows" why are 3rd party files stored in a sub directory of the system? Is Flash part of Windows? Here lies one fundamental security problem of Windows
Yes. The answer is yes. Flash is a part of Windows as much as any system program on unix is a part of that program called "lib". It installs libraries and administrator related tasks in the OS. What an amazing "security problem" it is to allow an administrator elevated task to write to the system folder.
I think you're being unfairly kind to Windows here.
Linux systems do not as a rule install things to "system" directories if they don't have to be there. And the standard for stuff you install yourself is to put it in /opt or /usr/local. This is one thing that OSX actually has right. The OS is in one place, everything else is somewhere else.
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You're right. Windows is very similar. This isn't a program we're talking about. It's an uninstaller specifically only executable as a superuser. Historically Windows has kept uninstall information for multi-user software in the system directory. It's more of a recent concept to store them elsewhere and then reference them in the registry.
Mind you this has nothing at all to do with Windows or Linux for that matter. The reality is any software installed via admin privileges can write to pretty much wherever
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Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Yes, why wouldn't they be? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with them
So you're a simpleton who doesn't understand why people who know the details have determined that it is clearly non-optimal?
Why do you also write a bunch of arrogant words? If you like it, that's fine, but if you pretend you don't know about the problems it means you need to also shut up about the subject, please.
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Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Yes, why wouldn't they be? There's nothing fundamentally wrong with them
So you're a simpleton who doesn't understand why people who know the details have determined that it is clearly non-optimal?
Why do you also write a bunch of arrogant words? If you like it, that's fine, but if you pretend you don't know about the problems it means you need to also shut up about the subject, please.
Drive letters are nothing more than poorly labeled mount points for file systems. /tmp/ instead of /home/ or /data_array_0/
There's an argument to be made that they're superior to standard unix-style mount points that appear to be part of the / filesystem because it's obvious that D:\ is a different filesystem than C:\, whereas on a unix system, users might need to do a little digging to figure out if they're copying too much data to / if they're copying to
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If you start off agreeing that they're poorly labelled, then you'll never be able to argue that they're optimal. Which would be the opposite of non-optimal.
You can only argue, "They're flawed but still OK." Which is FINE. I didn't say they weren't maybe OK for some people. I said "people who know the details have determined that it is clearly non-optimal"
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Well, VMware had a flash based console until v7. I only recently upgraded my environment so I was using the more functional flash version until just a couple of months ago.
[John]
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"C:\" Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Because god forbid, I want the first part of a file path to generally correlate to the physical location of a file.
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They only point to floppy drives if you have a floppy drive installed. They can be manually assigned to any drive you like but Windows won't automatically assign these letters to a drive unless it is a floppy drive.
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- "C:\" Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Oh please, SysAdmin of the future, tell me, how does Unix label DRIVES that is vastly superior to "C:"?
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- "C:\" Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
Oh please, SysAdmin of the future, tell me, how does Unix label DRIVES that is vastly superior to "C:"?
By using the drive UUID:
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Well, technically, in Windows 'C:' is not a 'drive', it's a filesystem on a partition on a drive, and may have other filesystems on other partitions on other disks mounted under it. It might be several partitions across several drives or a single partition among many on a drive.
Under *nix, they are named whatever you like. The closest analog to 'C:' would be '/', which is at least simpler. So what about adding another device? If it is detachable, then it'll probably get a name from the desktop management th
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Actua
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As A UNIX user, that file path makes me roll my eyes for several reasons:
- "C:\" Drive letters are still a thing in the 21st century?
What is so bad about drive letters? It is much easier to access a drive with T:\ than it is to access it via /dev/sdt. Sure you could mount the drive in Linux and give it a fancy directory name but guess what you can do the same thing in Windows.
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Why would I want to change C as the first hard drive? That benefits me not at all. But yeah, make it A if you want.
The "Windows" directory has a subdirectory for 3rd party (actually, non-privileged MS components are there too) code that uses the COM subsystem to be embedable in other apps. An installable subdirectory is not a security hole.
Again, a filename that was truncated for compatibility to its release in the mid-to-late 1990's. Why would you change a working path?
Why on earth would someone want t
Re: (Score:2)
As A UNIX user, that file path makes me roll my eyes for several reasons: .
- "Macromed" haha that's the funniest part, "Macromedia" truncated to 8 chars because of backward compatibilty to the 80s
As opposed to Linux which still maintains 1.X kernels?
It took 10 years (Score:2)
Microsoft is forcing Internet Explorer users to use Edge as well, because everyone hates IE in 2021.
Re: (Score:2)
I have seen these Uninstall alerts (Score:2)
But fake Flash update alerts have been so often used to inject malware that I have ben ignoring them.
Re: (Score:1)
Very patronizing by Adobe (?) (Score:1)
From https://www.adobe.com/products... [adobe.com]:
Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.
While I agree in general that Flash needs to die, I wonder what exactly "will block Flash content from running in Flash Player" means. Serious question because I have not used Flash in years.
But this sounds like Adobe is breaking users' installations without consent. Even if there is not much of value lost, I consider that a big no-no.
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Obviously, when Flash software starts up, it will check the system date, and if after Jan 12, 2021, it will error out/abort.
Adobe isn't "breaking user installations without their consent" the user chose to install the update that implements this function (or lack thereof).
Re: (Score:1)
OK, but were the users informed that the current version will refuse to run after Jan 12, 2021, before they updated?
Because right now, Adobe does not offer downloads of older versions anymore. You can still get those from 3rd party websites, but that is a risk by itself - who knows if they have malware inserted.
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I was considering going to the old flash player archive to downgrade, but they already EOLed that. Maybe people with a corporate license?
One Last Game of Super Mario Crossover (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
That's precisely the sort of game that Flashpoint [bluemaxima.org] was developed for.
Such a shame. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Now people will never know of zombo.com, which unfortunately can't update due to funding.
Sadly the sound seems to have gone through some kind of analog filter. [html5zombo.com]
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oblig xkcd quote (Score:2)
What about that permanent Control Panel item? (Score:2)
What about that permanent Flash Player Control Panel item? I don't see it in "Programs and Features." It's almost like it's a permanent fixture in Windows even though tomorrow it's supposed to die.
Other places, too. (Score:2)
Macs are popping up this same warning to uninstall Flash. So are browsers.
Linky to removal patch (Score:2)
http://www.catalog.update.micr... [microsoft.com]
yes, and? (Score:2)
These have been appearing in MacOS for the last 3+ months. Not news
It will take down part of my company (Score:1)
Our vendor uses flash and IE css for their website tools that our techs use. Our programs use legacy widgets to a popular European car company site to flash our car engines and without flash we cease to function. They haven't updated it since 2008 and as it is we need to install in compatibility for XP so 2 in safe mode for all our PC's
Will somebody think of the CEO (Score:1)
Microsoft installed (Score:1)