Senator Asks US Agencies To Remove Flash From Government Websites (bleepingcomputer.com) 57
An anonymous reader writes: In a letter sent today, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden asked officials from three government agencies (NIST, NSA, DHS) to come up with solutions and procedures that mandate the removal of Adobe Flash content from all US government websites by August 1, 2019. The Senator is urging US government officials to act in light of Adobe's Flash end-of-life date scheduled for the end of 2020, after which Adobe announced it would cease to provide any technical support for the software.
Senator Wyden is hoping to avoid a situation like the one of Windows XP, which US government agencies still use, despite Microsoft retiring the operating system back in 2014. Besides removing Flash from its websites, the Senator would also want Flash removed from computer of employees by the same August 1, 2019 deadline.
Senator Wyden is hoping to avoid a situation like the one of Windows XP, which US government agencies still use, despite Microsoft retiring the operating system back in 2014. Besides removing Flash from its websites, the Senator would also want Flash removed from computer of employees by the same August 1, 2019 deadline.
Ask away (Score:1)
He can ask, but that doesn't mean it will be done. If anything, I'd be willing to bet that those deadlines will not be met.
Re: (Score:2)
He can do a hell of a lot more than "ASK". He can push. He might even be able to find a law on the books they're breaking if they don't move off flash, or he might get a new law put on the books they will be violating if they miss the deadline.
He's a Senator, and apparently a very IT tech-savvy one, which is a refreshing thing to see... since he knows about the Flash deprecation. If they don't provide a satisfactory answer, then he can potentially sponsor legislation or an amendment to leg
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Speaking of Ron Wyden, of Oregon, mysidia noted:
He can do a hell of a lot more than "ASK". He can push. He might even be able to find a law on the books they're breaking if they don't move off flash, or he might get a new law put on the books they will be violating if they miss the deadline.
He's a Senator, and apparently a very IT tech-savvy one, which is a refreshing thing to see... since he knows about the Flash deprecation. If they don't provide a satisfactory answer, then he can potentially sponsor legislation or an amendment to legislation that will get passed requiring that they meet the deadline Or prohibit any further IT spending on equipment including maintenance, power, and network connectivity, until all Adobe flash-related software and flash-based executable objects (SWF, FLV) are removed from that equipment.
Well ... no.
As a senator of the minority party - which he currently is - he can propose legislation for which he can find a majority party co-sponsor. If he can find co-sponsors in the House, all the better - but even with both conditions being true, there's still no guarantee that any legislation he proposes will be adopted by both houses, and signed by the current president.
He can't even hold hearings on the subject, because that's not how our system works f
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He's also dead, so there's that ...
That didn't stop Strom Thurmond for the last couple of decades before they buried him.
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Depending on the actual flash content, it is likely that someone could raise a stink related to the ADA ...
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Usually they aren't hiding text in Flash or using Flash for the sake of just using Flash, so there's
probably no grounds for ADA complaints.... After all, the replacement is HTML5 scripting, which pretty
much has the same characteristics.
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One of the biggest problems is reusing HTML components that are open source. They never have built-in support for disabilities.
If the HTML components are open source, then built-in support for disabilities could be added.
NWS radar loops use Flash (Score:5, Informative)
As of July 2018, the default "enhanced version" of each National Weather Service radar loop still uses Flash. The "standard version" uses an animated GIF.
Examples: standard radar loop for Northern Indiana [weather.gov]; enhanced radar loop for Northern Indiana [weather.gov]
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Once again proving that gif is awesome and we need to get the hell out of Indiana.
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Why is it going away ? (Score:1)
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Everyone hated flash when it was a highly pushed and supported platform. Adobe realized that everyone hates it and have been trying to kill it for years.
Why would Adobe continue to support something that no longer makes money and causes ire and hate to be directed at them?
Re:Why is it going away ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hold on there, the actual story is nuanced.
Designers, marketers, and bosses loved it because you had WYSIWYG control over everything. You were not dependent on gijillion browser brand and version combinations all rendering placements differently or having different JavaScript bugs. You saw the preview and it worked just about the same way on every user's PC.
And end-users didn't really care as long as it worked and Flash applications loaded relatively quick. Installation and upgrade steps and problems got to them sometimes, and reports of security problems combined with these installation headaches finally made it not worth it to them. That's when the slow decline started. Adobe using upgrades to sneak junkware onto PC's via sneaky prompts didn't help matters.
Some slick games and gizmos used Flash. HTML5/JS versions of equivalent still seem glitchy and browser-version-sensitive to me. Whether it will eventually settle, or some new trend/fad will break it worse is hard to say.
Dealing with ever-mutating fat clients (browsers) is still an ongoing pain and a yuuuge IT labor drain. It's job security for us IT workers, but you do have to marvel at the jillions of hours of diddling and fiddling it causes. The first generation wasted time replacing mainframe vacuum tubes, the current generation wastes time testing & debugging on myriad browser variations.
Every generation will probably be a slave to its own tech limitations. In the minicomputer era, I remember how we spent a lot of time babysitting modem-related problems. In the desktop era, we had installation problems such as DLL-Hell (DLL version conflicts). At least in the minicomputer and desktop era, once the app got running, you usually had consistent front-end rendering.
Re: (Score:3)
It depends. If the grame or application is programmed as a web game, it will likely be glitchy.
However, the new trend is WebAssembly, and you don't code in it directly, but use a cross-compiler. You write your code in C and it compiles down to a bunch of javascript (using a highly restricted
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Ok ok fine, I will amend my statement.
Everybody with at least half a brain hated flash.
But, seriously, I do understand what you mean. It was an easy way to roll out rich apps in an era where there were few options. (ActiveX? Yuck. Applets? Ha!) I am already starting on my own DLL hell as I am looking to upgrade 10 year old javascript frameworks to modern ones like Angular 4 (or maybe something more stable, whatever happened to Angular 3, anyhow?)
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Designers, marketers, and bosses loved it because you had WYSIWYG control over everything.
Yes, they did. Let us not forget [nngroup.com].
And end-users didn't really care
End-users did care because Flash was most notoriously known for obnoxious ads.
Re: Why is it going away ? (Score:1)
Re:Why is it going away ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they realized it was insecure by design, could not be made secure, was one of the highest causes of security incidents on the web, and was actively giving the company a bad name- and could become a source of legal issues for negligence and culpability.
Unusual (Score:1)
I'm impressed with Senator Wyden. (Score:3)
Perhaps Senator Wyden can be encouraged to run for President of the U.S. in 2020.
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Perhaps Senator Wyden can be encouraged to run for President of the U.S. in 2020.
Patience patience.... I want to see him first get a plan out of these guys to have all the government systems mandated to be switched away from this deprecated Windows OS to something more respectable and secure.
Re:I'm impressed with Senator Wyden. (Score:4)
So am I, and always vote for him, but it's difficult to reconcile someone who both champions against government abuses such as mass surveillance and FISA, but also consistently votes to impede a citizen's right to possess firearms.
Not just sensible gun control measures, but absurdities such as voting against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, [congress.gov] in support of allowing gun and ammo manufacturers to be sued into oblivion for the acts of criminals.
I suppose some leeway must be granted in considering the kind of company he keeps. It just goes to show that no politician is ever ideal.
The senator has a point (Score:4, Funny)
I'll just leave this here. [abstrusegoose.com]
Remove Flash From Government Websites (Score:5, Funny)
Aquaman and Cyborg will be removed next. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman will stay.
Adobe Mismanagement (Score:2)
Flash had so much potential but was mismanaged to death.. quite literally apparently.
Apple didn't want flash running on it's phones but that's a total non-issue because how many of us open a web browser on our phones to interface with rich content? Basically nobody - we all use apps! And Flash code can seamlessly port to ios or android as an app and many of the top games were made in flash for a long time. You probably didn't even know you were running flash code because it was ported.
It's ridiculous and a
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Problem was, there was, and still is, content on the web that's only available via flash. It's not just an issue of not being able to see it on phones, but that applies to tablets also, a device who's primary purpose was content consumption.
I think Apple was trying to force the issue, and make the holdouts switch to something else (html5?). Android followed suit a little later. So flash should have died then, right? Instead, the content became "desktop only".
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Remove IE only pages too (Score:2)
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True, but we have to deal with a lot more government websites that use Flash than Silverlight. Adobe Flex was a great reporting platform for over a decade so I can understand why the government used it, but I don't get why they would ever use Silverlight except due to pressure from Microsoft.