Microsoft Starts Removing Flash From Windows Devices 73
Microsoft has begun deploying this week KB4577586, a Windows update that permanently removes the Adobe Flash Player software from Windows devices. From a report: The update was formally announced last year at the end of October when Microsoft and other browser makers were preparing for the impending Flash end-of-life, scheduled for the end of 2020. According to a support document published at the time, the update was initially supposed to be optional. System administrators who wanted to remove Flash before the EOL date could access the Microsoft Update Catalog, download the KB4577586 packages, and remove Flash to avoid any security-related issues. But this week, multiple Windows 10 users reported that Microsoft is now forcibly installing KB4577586 on their devices and removing Flash support from the OS. While users might think this would cause issues for some enterprises, it actually does not. Last year, Adobe introduced a time bomb in the Flash Player code that prevents the Flash Player app from playing content after January 12.
It's your computer. (Score:4, Insightful)
But this week, multiple Windows 10 users reported that Microsoft is now forcibly installing KB4577586 on their devices and removing Flash support from the OS. While users might think this would cause issues for some enterprises, it actually does not. Last year, Adobe introduced a time bomb in the Flash Player code that prevents the Flash Player app from playing content after January 12.
With the often missed point that Microsoft FORCED the decision, not asked, could I remove this please.
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You know, in Europe that is _criminal_ behavior, i.e. no click-though license does anything. Of course, nobody will be doing anything against Microsoft.
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Re:It's your computer. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it looks like they will just remove their own Flash, not that one from Adobe. In that case they are modifying their own product. That should be gray area and may be legal. If they were to remove Adobe Flash installed by the user, that would be different.
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I'm not sure it matters whether it's legal or not. When I installed Win10 for the first time years ago for evaluation, it removed 11 3rd-party applications from the system without warning or confirmation. The applications weren't just disabled or anything, the files were outright gone. After the Win10 update completed, I received a notification that the applications were removed as they were deemed "incompatible" with Win10. I mean, it's not like the developers could have been given time to release upda
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I'm not sure it matters whether it's legal or not. When I installed Win10 for the first time years ago for evaluation, it removed 11 3rd-party applications from the system without warning or confirmation. The applications weren't just disabled or anything, the files were outright gone. After the Win10 update completed, I received a notification that the applications were removed as they were deemed "incompatible" with Win10. I mean, it's not like the developers could have been given time to release updates or anything.
From that point forward, I decided not to run Win10... ever. I'm still running Win7 for the time being.
It probably does not matter. Too many people and companies do not really have an alternative.
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They are removing a product they sold to you, where is the refund. Windows anal probe 10 wake up to the reality, used users.
Their version of Flash, I think (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Their version of Flash, I think (Score:2)
AFAIK, XP never bundled Java. Where did you hear that?
Re: Their version of Flash, I think (Score:4, Informative)
Get off my lawn, etc
Kid in my day we would go and confirm that a lie is a lie before calling it one. Microsoft had their own JVM that they lost a licensing battle with Oracle over because they made custom changes to the JVM. It was part of Windows since Java runs anywhere.
Now apologize to op
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According to Wikipedia, the initial release of Windows XP did not come with the bundled Microsoft JVM, SP1, released in September 2002 did have the bundled JVM, but it was removed in SP1a in February 2003. So basically XP had a bundled Microsoft JVM for about five months. After that you had to install Sun's Java install to get a JVM on Windows. So while it's factually true that XP did have Microsoft's JVM installed, it was for an incredibly brief period of that product's lifespan. When I was doing developme
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Ah. Come to think of, probably. Removing the Adobe version intentionally without asking would be criminal "computer sabotage" in Europe.
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No, it is MY version of Flash that I paid for that potentially runs system critical applications that deal with potentially billions of dollars worth of internal infrastructure.
It does not matter if it is Flash or Paint, I paid for it, I use it regularly, and for all MS knowns losing the use of it will cost me millions of dollars in revenue per minute. Sure, Maybe I am an idiot for not paying a developer to make my mine own OS with my very own version of Paint or Flash if I have that much money on teh line,
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Sure, Maybe I am an idiot for not paying a developer to make my mine own OS with my very own version of Paint or Flash if I have that much money on teh line,
No, you're not an idiot for that.
You're an idiot for not bothering to port your crap to HTML5 for a full ten years after Adobe themselves said that Flash was a redundant and deprecated dead end, and ignoring *every single* OS and browser vendor who has repeatedly stated over that time that Flash is being terminated.
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No, it is MY version of Flash that I paid for that potentially runs system critical applications that deal with potentially billions of dollars worth of internal infrastructure.
It does not matter if it is Flash or Paint, I paid for it, I use it regularly, and for all MS knowns losing the use of it will cost me millions of dollars in revenue per minute. Sure, Maybe I am an idiot for not paying a developer to make my mine own OS with my very own version of Paint or Flash if I have that much money on teh line, but many people out their will have their loverhood, their house on the lioe but not make enough money to afford to make everything themselves.
It is really not nearly that clear cut. If MS fixes a bug that you happened to be relying on, do you have a cause of action against them? If they don't remove flash because you depend on it, do others that encounter security issues because of it have a cause of action against MS for not removing it? If MS fixes a bug in Paint that makes the binary bigger, and your disk fills up and your system crashes, do you have a cause of action?
If you say that MS is not allowed to update/alter the product at all afte
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Removing features is not updating. I am pretty sure this has been litigated before, and it illegal is at least some jurisdictions.
They can release security patches, but I do not think MS is liable for your system security, and at the very least Flash is no more insecure today than the day you bought your computer. And I do not see why this is even an issue anymore, why do browsers not just run in an invisible virtual box? Anyone is perfectly capable of booting up a virtual machine and running a browser in t
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If it is that mission critical why do you have auto-updates enabled.
If it is that mission critical and you haven't heard in the last year that Flash is at end of life and being decommissioned by everyone it is on you when the software stops working not on Microsoft or anyone else. You don't need to write a complete OS for yourself to be informed that Flash was being killed and providing an exit plan for yourself when the software no longer worked.
As far as I know no one has had to pay for flash (flash devel
Removing flash, installing Chromium (Score:2)
Ironicly Internet Explorer is still here surviving all the web upheavals.
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or even open sourced edgehtml
Hasn't the open source community suffered enough at the hands of MS?
So many resources lost (Score:3)
While I understand why they would want to remove it, as there was a lot of security issues, I wonder why they have to disable it completely. Recent versions of the flash player even had code that refuse to run after a certain date. There are a lot of old resources out there that require flash to operate. I don't see why they couldn't just have it not play or add some special advanced work around for people to enable it to work on certain sites.
I had to find an old version from some shady site and install it on a virtual machine with Windows XP in order to get some old product information that was only available as an archived flash page. Nobody is going to update this content, and I think the solution of disabling it completely is just going to create more harm than good when people go searching for alternative methods to view the content they wan to see.
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Doesn't archive.org have their own Flash emulator? Is it not hooked up to their web archive?
If there's a workaround left in place, Nigerian princes will tell people how to activate it to earn millions.
If you can adjust the clock on your snapshotted vm, you're probably fine.
South Africa has its own unsafe browser available too.
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There are flash emulators but the one I treid, Ruffle didn't see to work with the site I was trying to use. I'm not sure what technology archive.org is using.
Re: So many resources lost (Score:2)
There's nothing stopping you from saving the entire page, scripts and all, and extracting the flash player parts. The easiest is probably to look for where the Flash emulator is given the contents to play, and replace that with your own, using developer tools or by editing the saved page. Like a URL or something. Or, even easier, swap out the swf file in the saved page.
Re: So many resources lost (Score:3)
I have tons of flash material I saved from the mid 2000s. They do not work with many open source flash players. Such a shame a portion of history is gone
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You can keep on using the Adobe flash version after the timebomb: just edit the mms.cfg file correctly and whitelist the domains.
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There are a lot of old resources out there that require flash to operate
Sorry but honestly fuck old resources. If you care so little about this piece of technology that has been antiquated for so long that you didn't bother to migrate it, you can't complain when it stops working.
If this finally drives a nail through the stupidity of people who can't manage obsolescence then I'm all for it. Hell I hope their computers catch fire.
Re:So many resources lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Well you are a short sighted fool then.
I routinely work with Win95 to run a scientific instrument. I'd love to be able to work with newer OS's and more importantly larger screen resolutions, and be able to hook it up to the network and not have it air gapped. But unless YOU are willing to give me and the instrument owners the $150K+ to upgrade software and connections, or $300-500K for a new instrument that will do the exact same thing to the exact same precision, I will gladly keep running "old tech". It "just works", and it is old enough to know pretty much every bug and how to work around them.
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I routinely work with Win95 to run a scientific instrument.
It's ironic to call someone a short sighted fool only to proceed to talk about something that is completely unaffected by this change.
Come back when you have an internet connected scientific device running Windows 10. Then we can talk about the need to keep flash running on a level playingfield.
Your post itself demonstrates shortsightedness on this topic.
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I think the general consensus among the major tech companies that the time of accommodating legacy Flash applications has come to an end. OS and platform maintainers view Flash as one big whopping security vulnerability, and they don't want it on their platforms. And really, this has been pretty public for five or six years now, with even Adobe openly stating it wanted Flash to die. If you haven't moved to HTML5 at this point, then that's your own damned fault. Every OS manufacturer and every browser develo
Porn will save Flash (Score:2)
It is not going to work anyways. I do not see any migration away from Flash on the content end. Ten years ago it went from being cutting edge, and very common for entire sites to be made in it, to handling videos and the occasional scrolling multimedia bar. And it is the same today, half the video sites out there still require flash, and it is not too uncommon to see the odd interactive widget.
If your use case is anything other than browsing Facebook all day, You probably need flash. It is probably only for
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This is the version Microsoft distributed, for use in Internet Explorer (now dead) and old versions of Edge (also now dead). I guess some other software could have been using it, I don't know any. It's really just cleaning up useless files.
IE and old Edge have been force uninstalled too, by the way.
If you installed Flash direct from Adobe, for use in Firefox or derivatives which are the only ones that even support it any more, it will be unaffected. Of course it's dead as well now, thanks to Adobe's time-bo
What is the obsession with "uninstalling" (Score:2)
I really don't get the obsession with getting flash totally uninstalled.
It seems like the more appropriate thing to do is to "update" browsers to disable its use as a plug-in. Isn't that how most problematic plug-ins/extensions are handled? Ok, in this case the remnant Flash software probably would not serve any other purpose, but what is the specific problem?
I find this disturbing as many people do require "old" applications for one reason or another. Will it become standard practice now that all other "ol
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That said, if a given piece of software is defunct - which Flash now is for almost all users - then from a security perspective the best practice is absolutely to uninstall it since just because it's sitting there unused on your hard drive doesn't mean it can't be leveraged as part of a pri
Re: What is the obsession with "uninstalling" (Score:2)
SaaS is what you get, when you have software *development* as a service (because it is), but douse it in ALL the imaginary property thuggery.
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It was packaged with Windows, thus Microsoft has the "right" (and actually the liability) to remove it. This is not removing other vendors' Flash software that was installed manually.
Flash (Score:2)
About time you stopped exposing yourself like that, Windows. Dirty Old Man.
Ok MS now you get an BILL to replace old routers w (Score:1)
Ok MS now you get an BILL to replace old routers with flash on them.
Or you can give the choice to not force install it
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juniper has some flash in the admin mainly starts (older software)
How many more time bombs await us? (Score:2)
It's even in the hardware by now.
You can't make people buy new stuff if the old stuff still works.
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You can't make people buy new stuff if the old stuff still works.
My phone still works. But AT&T is making me upgrade to a 5G unit. Even though 5G hasn't got a chance in hell of working in my neighborhood.
OK, but are those appliances for the disabled? (Score:2)
Or why are you our nanny, dear corporation apparenty named after their MBAs' standard issue penis.
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"My system is insecure because the provider hasn't upgraded their software in 15 years" is not a reason to push your problems on others.
Talk to your software provider, or source an alternative, if they haven't already contacted you because of their inherently-insecure systems that can be fully exploited remotely or locally by your users to gain full administrative access to your machines.
GORDON IS ALIVE!!! (Score:2)
I mean, err, Flash has more holes than Swiss cheese and I thought we put the final nail in it's coffin 5 years ago .
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Believe me when I say that if I could do away with Flash entirely, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately I have to deal with things that are not under my control, and this is one of them.
I am curious if any of the "Flash-to-html5" converters are any good. That would solve one or two of the Flash instances I'm forced to use.
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Sometimes there is no non-Flash alternative. Shocking but true.
If I could force the manufacturers of the equipment to rise from the grave and go back into business and update the software, I'd do it.
Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering this is Slashdot, not many people seem to know the difference between the Flash ActiveX plugin and Microsoft version installed via Windows Update / IE, and the Flash "Netscape" plugin, and the standalone Flash DLLs inside the Adobe distribution.
And this has been coming for OVER A DECADE (I banned Flash in both my previous workplaces and aside from a very occasional "why doesn't this ancient website work, it never affected anything) and you guys still aren't ready for it?
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"Considering this is Slashdot, not many people seem to know the difference between the Flash ActiveX plugin and Microsoft version installed via Windows Update / IE, and the Flash "Netscape" plugin, and the standalone Flash DLLs inside the Adobe distribution."
That's because Slashdot "regulars" are the worst kind of technically "adept": A little bit of knowledge + a lot of attitude/ego = I AM SRS EXPRT, LET ME BEGIN BY SAYING "ACTUALLY..."
People are here to swing their dick around and make bold pronouncements
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If the patch is as high-quality a piece of sh^H^H work as the version they released last year, it'll churn for a few seconds then fail with nothing except a "something went wrong, we don't know what, and we won't even give you a generic error code as a hint" message.
On the bright side, it's been easy *enough* to remove the built-in Flash even with MS's usual "Bad user! You no touchy my special stuffs!" mentality for preinstalled crapware. If they'd just stopped forcibly REinstalling it every month for the p
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I will never be "ready" for somebody else decided what stuff should work and what should be taken away.
Any serious geek should know the difference between creating new content and dependencies on old software, and keeping old stuff working for historical or compatibility reasons. I keep an archive of Windows Live Mail 2009 handy, not because I want to use it for production purposes, but to ensure I can import mail from an old Outlook Express archive if necessary. Microsoft deleted all traces of WLM 2009 f
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And any serious geek can block that update if they care enough to work out how to do that. It's really not hard.
And your mail archive backups aren't backups if you don't also backup the tools to access them. Not just the installers but a VM with the software installed, for instance.
You're dealing with commercial enterprises where companies in India and China will run their creaking infrastructure off ANYTHING they can get, no matter how insecure, and destroying the brand name because they're still running
Flash is Excel (Score:2)
Flash was another one of those (relatively rare) technologies that became far, far too overutilized and employed for things it flat-out should not have been used for. The same thing happened with spreadsheets, where they grow and grow in complexity into full-blown applications.
The main cause of this phenomenon is when you have a professional group (artists using Flash, business and accounting using Excel, etc) that are not "software developers" that become familiar with a tool that enables them to create a
Good thing it is so secure then (Score:2)
While users might think this would cause issues for some enterprises, it actually does not. Last year, Adobe introduced a time bomb in the Flash Player code that prevents the Flash Player app from playing content after January 12.
Good thing FLASH is so secure, and could never, ever, ever be hacked to turn off the time restrictions then isn't it? /s
And with Adobe's track record with regards to flash, anyone taking bets on whether just turning back your clock on the PC to before Jan 12 will let it run again?
Microsoft starts removing flash from Windows PCs (Score:2)
Damn you, Microsoft! What now, eh? Are we all supposed to go back to mechanical drives or something? WTF?!?!!1
"For the children" (Score:2)
It is all for protecting the naive children. They could click on a malware by mistake; we would not want that, right?
To protect the innocent, we are making the proactive action of taking away the dangerous toys. We took away your "buckyballs" in the past, and now we are taking away Flash.
Hopefully we will not need to take more in the future, that would be a real shame...
Good news (Score:1)
Fuckers...Give Us a Warning First (Score:2)
I was literally in the middle of a Civilization V game when my screen went dark for a few seconds, and when it came back Civ had been killed, and my browser relaunched. I immediately opened the task manager and saw installers for Chrome and Edge running. There was no warning any of this was going to happen.