FTC Is In Talks With Adobe About the 'Flash Problem'

jamie links to news that the FTC is talking with Adobe about persistent Flash cookies. "Flash isn't actually necessary to watch YouTube videos, but the rest of this article is interesting."

Re:RTFA ??

[larry bagina]

Simple: this is slashdot and we hate flash and want to eliminate it. Except on the iPhone. We don't use the iPhone and don't know anybody that does, but it needs to support flash for some reason.

Steve may have been right

[alvinrod]

More and more, its looking like Steve Jobs was right (albeit for the wrong reasons) about Flash. HTML 5 is capable of replacing Flash in 95% of cases and in almost all of those cases provides better performance and accessibility. Ending the web's dependence on Flash is a lot like ending dependence on foreign energy.

Re:What if the local storage is made zero?

[IrrepressibleMonkey]

Not sure, but experience shows that most Flash sites will stop working when you deny storage rights.

THIS is a summary?

[Rorschach1]

Seriously, WTF? How about a sentence telling us what the 'flash problem' is, and maybe a bit about WHY the article is interesting?

Re:What if the local storage is made zero?

[symbolset]

If the site requires the ability to store flash evercookies as a cost of viewing the site, I'm OK with not being able to see their content. It's too much to pay.

Re:What if the local storage is made zero?

[beakerMeep]

Flash's behavior when disable cookies is really terrible, mostly due to developers that don't care about such a situation. However, this is pretty much the same with any given HTML/javascript web app. From my perspective simply blaming Flash isn't constructive.

The real problem is having multiple locations to store local data and no single place to clear it. I'd say the browsers and W3C should be the solution to this. They should really put their collective foot down and set a standard by which plugins are allowed to store data and integrate with the browser. This would go a long way towards solving a lot of the privacy concerns of Flash and HTML5. There would still be some tricks to identify a user (font list, user agent string, plugin versions, etc) but again the solution is the same.

Flash

[DaMattster]

Flash has seen its day come and go. With Webm and HTML5, Flash will be killed off!

Re:Flash Problem?

[redJag]

ActionScript isn't like JavaScript? They are both based on ECMA Script, they are very similar as languages.

ECMAScript is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web, in the form of several well-known dialects such as JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. [wikipedia.org]

I've (unfortunately) written a lot of both and they are extremely similar to each other. Yes, there are a lot of features inside that bloated Flash runtime, but that doesn't mean ActionScript is not like JavaScript.