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Chromium Government

To Re-Enable Flash Support, South Africa's Tax Agency Released Its Own Web Browser (zdnet.com) 151

"The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser," reports ZDNet, "for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms." To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe began blocking Flash content from playing inside the app starting January 12, with the help of a time-bomb mechanism... As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets. But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial. Instead, the South African government agency decided to take one of the most mind-blowing decisions in the history of bad IT decisions and release its own web browser.

Released on Monday on the agency's official website, the new SARS eFiling Browser is a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser that has two features.

The first is to re-enable Flash support. The second is to let users access the SARS eFiling website.

As Chris Peterson, a software engineer at Mozilla, pointed out, the SARS browser only lets users access the official SARS website, which somewhat reduces the risk of users getting their systems infected via Flash exploits while navigating the web. But as others have also pointed out, this does nothing for accessibility, as the browser is only available for Windows users and not for other operating systems such as macOS, Linux, and mobile users, all of which are still unable to file taxes.

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To Re-Enable Flash Support, South Africa's Tax Agency Released Its Own Web Browser

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  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:39PM (#61013648)

    ...that the South African Revenue Service (SARS) would have had the funds to do the conversion years ago, but since they apparently didn't even have the funds to change their acronym, SARS being a bit, on the nose these times, shall we say, so I guess not.

    • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @09:54PM (#61013884)

      ...that the South African Revenue Service (SARS) would have had the funds to do the conversion years ago,

      Actually, they did do a new version, but SARS 2.0 met with public resistance.

    • by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      This feels more like one of those "we used the name first, why should we be the ones to change it" cases.

      • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @01:15AM (#61014342)

        One of my favourite things ever is when the two (at the time) conservative political parties in Canada merged. Their new name? "Conservative Reform Alliance Party." When they realized that CRAP was a bad acronym, they thought they'd fix it by calling it the "Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party" or C-CRAP. it took them a while to finalize on "Conservative Party of Canada" (after a stop at CCP).

      • We had a lemonade called by the Egyptian godess "ISIS" over here.
        It didn't sell very well. XD

        • by robsku ( 1381635 )

          There was also a band called Isis, not sure if they changed their name, and a barbershop with the same name somewhere, before the infamous terrorist group... It sucks for them, especially for a band that has existed quite some time and gained fame to have to change their names because people can't differentiate them from a terrorist group that came later; I'm not saying the problem wasn't understandable, just wish it wasn't so...

          I wonder how many groups and businesses there have been using that name before

        • There was a bookstore too in Colorado too.

          US bookstore changes Isis branding after attacks [theguardian.com]
          Vandals smashed signs and harassed owners at Denver new-age shop, so it has been rededicated to the ‘Goddess of 10,000 Names’

          Can we just refer to them as "daesh"?

        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          Could you buy some with your phone using ISIS [wikipedia.org]?
        • I was debating using IS-IS as our routing protocol here at work, but wound up for more than one reason going with OSPF. For years it was pounded into us that Cisco's implementation of IS-IS was done better than Cisco's implementation of OSPF - I hear that's a non-issue these days. It was pretty plain that I'd have an uphill battle implementing something with a name like that without a really good reason.

    • You've also got to understand how SARS works, it's a government department in an African country and things work the African way there: Lots of embezzling, underfunding, nepotism, etc. ESCOM is a similar story, they were once one of the best-run power companies in the world and for the last few years they've been bankrupt. So this isn't nearly as crazy as it sounds. Welcome to Africa.
      • You've also got to understand how SARS works, it's a government department in an African country and things work the African way there: Lots of embezzling, underfunding, nepotism, etc. ESCOM is a similar story, they were once one of the best-run power companies in the world and for the last few years they've been bankrupt. So this isn't nearly as crazy as it sounds. Welcome to Africa.

        Their colonial rulers set up the system to funnel revenue (not just profits) back to the colonials' home countries. Africans just inherited it & redirected the funds to their new African leaders. According to John Pilger, not that much has changed in South Africa.

        • It's not necessarily the leaders, it's the locals as well. You see that in some town where the person in charge of revenue collection for ESCOM is driving around in a Mercedes while the parent company goes bankrupt, what revenue they're able to obtain despite the rampant theft stays where it's collected rather than being forwarded to pay for the service provided. Or, more often than not, not provided because the infrastructure has been run to failure, or stolen, or provided by the Guptas and never worked
          • It is the same story in almost all the ex-British Colonies. The locals don't know how to run a system that doesn't loot everyone openly. Those who knew were killed of generations ago.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          To be fair it took Europe centuries to develop more robust democracies, and the US benefitted by starting from scratch... And even then needed a couple of dozen amendments to get to the less than ideal situation it has today.

          Not that parts of Europe are that much better. Poland is in trouble and the UK has turned into a chumocracy. The corruption in Britain puts many developing nations to shame.

    • They eliminated SARS in Nigeria. (Special Anti-Robbery Squad).

      Dismantlement of SARS [wikipedia.org]

  • by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:39PM (#61013650)
    Yep, that sounds safe.

    (Bonus points for having a service named SARS.)
    • by slazzy ( 864185 )
      Yup, database dumps coming to a download near you soon....
      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        Honest question. Why do you think that? What does server-side security have anything to do with flash in the browser?

        Sure flash is not supported and is probably exploitable by a malicious flash file hosted somewhere. But other than that, with https to a specific backend server, how is it any different than a javascript html5 front end? As long as people only use this browser as essentially a tax app, I don't really see the problem other than the fact that flash sucks generally, and the cost of using it n

        • by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @10:33PM (#61013974) Homepage

          It ought to be perfectly safe to use Flash for your taxes, agreed. But, in the real world, you definitely shouldn't trust any sensitive information to a Flash website.

          Why? Because if they haven't fixed a pressing front end issue like that so many years after they should have, you can bet they're doing a similarly lackadaisical job on server security. They're probably running PHP 4.3 and MySQL 3.2 on an Ubuntu 10.04 server, or something like that. If a site doesn't update their front end for half a decade, you should expect the same of their back end.

          • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @10:51PM (#61014034) Journal

            They're probably running PHP 4.3 and MySQL 3.2 on an Ubuntu 10.04 server, or something like that.

            I very much doubt it. They are more likely to be using an obsolete stack on Windows.

          • Yes, but now you're doing a switcheroo and are jumping to a straw man argument.

          • Why? Because if they haven't fixed a pressing front end issue like that so many years after they should have, you can bet they're doing a similarly lackadaisical job on server security. They're probably running PHP 4.3 and MySQL 3.2 on an Ubuntu 10.04 server, or something like that. If a site doesn't update their front end for half a decade, you should expect the same of their back end.

            Good shout - according to Securi [sucuri.net], their filing site seems to be running IIS 7.5, which comes included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. A quick check in the browser confirms that the site is even secured with TLS 1.2!

        • Again, this is Africa. If you want a database dump, you pay an employee to grab one for you, no need to perform any technical attack.
    • Yep, that sounds safe. (Bonus points for having a service named SARS.)

      No less safe than a JS front end. JS was always higher on the list of critical vulnerabilities than Flash on annual web security reports.

      But yeah, talk about using the wrong tool for the job. Flash was terrible for text/HTML based use-case scenarios like forms & information. Why did they use Flash? Did they want animated percentages dancing around the screen?

  • apple to exit SA as they will not install windows to run this app and the m1 can't boot to windows any ways

  • those guys must really love Flash.

    • Or just are skimping on he IT budget. It works now, so why pay for personnel who do stuff we don't understand and who complain about needing to be ready for the future. Pfft, silly boffins.

  • by felixrising ( 1135205 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:49PM (#61013678)
    My forehead still hurts from hitting it with my palm. Can you imagine the discussions that were had where several options were presented, including the stupid option that no techie supported, where they release their own web browser and retain unsupported and insecure website, and the non-technical managers deciding this was the best choice over the other options like refactoring the website to HTML5 like the rest of the IT world has done.
    • by nashv ( 1479253 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @08:02PM (#61013708) Homepage

      I can't tell if you are being ignorant or facetious. The main issue with these conversions is that the money assigned to turnover large-nationwide systems is allotted only once every 25 years or so. In developing countries especially so - since they don't have spare billions. In the last 25 years, technology and security standards have updated so fast that government budget allotments cannot keep pace.

      So even if they managers completely understand the pitfalls of this approach, they have to make the thing work until their next system upgrade grant comes along. This is why they adopt this interim solution. It's not *always* ignorance of technology. On the other hand, your comment betrays an ignorance of logistics and economics.

      • by io333 ( 574963 )

        Developing Country?!?

        30 years ago South Africa was one of the most advanced countries on Earth.

        Astonishing that history keeps being rewritten and people jusr believe it.

        I give up.

        • Oh come off it. Before and after it was the same country with the same people and the same economic facts on the ground. The people in charge of the government changed, so they started cooking their books differently. Calling a place with more than 80% percent of the people near a stone age existence the most advanced in the world because the 20% had nukes and big telescopes and won some Nobel prizes is...a nonstandard way of assessing the situation.

      • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @11:29PM (#61014166)

        Not just developing nations. The US is this way also. The budget to do stuff is only there rarely, and none of it gets allocated to ongoing maintenance or periodic updates. Thus, bridges fall down, software gets old, etc. It's an odd mix, where you can say have the military with a huge budget for unnecessary stealth bombers while they still make do with decades old furniture and computers

        Of course, it is kind of tough to go to congress and complain that you need to upgrade your PDP-8s to state of the art VAX 860s I had a friend who used to work in an early warning base, and they indeed were still using some PDPs around the time the corporate world was phasing out workstations and going to Pentium based PCs, along with vintage steel desks.

        But you see it elsewhere. Freeways get a surge in fundings and we get a nationwide rollout, and not too much after that except repaving every few years. Not many new bridges unless an old one is deemed unsafe. Many decades old sewage and water systems are the norm. Most internet cables to the home are from the cable TV infrastructure put in place in the 70s and 80s.

        We've sort of left the era of the 50s/60s where we worried we were falling behind the Soviets so no expense was spared in being the best, to an era where every government and civic expense is scrutinized. It's 2021 and in the US you still do not have free online tax filing with feds or state because that would cut into private corporate tax software profits. Hard to laugh at South Africa when we're rather mediocre with our own tax agencies.

        • an era where every government and civic expense is scrutinized

          Oh please... the government is just incompetent, many times doing more harm than good, because most of the built-in incentives don't point toward success. Government spending per capita in constant dollars has more than tripled [usgovernmentspending.com] over the last 45 years. In that same time frame, the IRS (for example) has had at least three fully funded projects to replace their IT infrastructure. They failed at all of them.

          Face it, government projects tend to look a

          • If the US government isn't big enough to do IT in-house, I don't know who is. And yet literally everything gets outsourced to incompetent lowest-bidder (among inflated prices, though) contractors.

          • The lack of government is even more incompetent.

      • The main issue with these conversions is that the money assigned to turnover large-nationwide systems is allotted only once every 25 years or so. In developing countries especially so - since they don't have spare billions.

        This is not the case in South Africa, where SARS is one of the most well-funded Government entities.

        So even if they managers completely understand the pitfalls of this approach, they have to make the thing work until their next system upgrade grant comes along. This is why they adopt this interim solution. It's not *always* ignorance of technology. On the other hand, your comment betrays an ignorance of logistics and economics.

        I think in this case, it *is* ignorance. If you don't agree, watch this interview [youtube.com]

    • by muffen ( 321442 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @08:04PM (#61013710)
      They could have kept using flash AND using a standard browser: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/r... [github.com]
    • by nashv ( 1479253 )

      Also, if you RTFA, they didn't build a web browser. They basically have some kind of older Chromium build in kiosk mode . It can only be used to access their website/forms.

      "This SARS browser deploys as a separate application and can only be used to access the SARS eFiling website and SARS Corporate website. It cannot be used as a browser for general internet browsing."

      I will concede that calling it the SARS browser is really really unfortunate.

      • If they had called it an "app" nobody would have complained. Everyone expects an app to just be a web browser wrapped in a different skin these days.

    • by pz ( 113803 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @08:51PM (#61013784) Journal

      The IT department is probably not staffed by the best and the brightest. But they understand the enormity of the tax entry system and the complexity of testing a rewritten version. They likely don't have the funds and/or talent to be able to execute a ground-up rewrite or, surely, they'd have done so already.

      So they took Chromium, which is open-source after all, and created a highly restricted version that works only on one web site. I bet there are even guides to do that on the net. Isn't that called kiosk or standalone mode or something like that? And I bet there are guides on how to re-enable Flash. I bet many of the people on Slashdot could accomplish all that in an afternoon.

      Moreover, the testing is pretty simple: (a) does it work as we expect on the legacy system? (b) can it be used to access any other web site? And that's about it.

      It's a short-term fix for a longer-term problem that they are obviously aware of. Rather than government stupidity, perhaps it is a judicious use of available resources?

      (Apparently the filter thinks my comment looks too much like ascii art. Odd.)

      • The IT department is probably not staffed by the best and the brightest. But they understand the enormity of the tax entry system and the complexity of testing a rewritten version. They likely don't have the funds and/or talent to be able to execute a ground-up rewrite or, surely, they'd have done so already.

        So they took Chromium, which is open-source after all, and created a highly restricted version that works only on one web site. I bet there are even guides to do that on the net. Isn't that called kiosk or standalone mode or something like that? And I bet there are guides on how to re-enable Flash. I bet many of the people on Slashdot could accomplish all that in an afternoon.

        Moreover, the testing is pretty simple: (a) does it work as we expect on the legacy system? (b) can it be used to access any other web site? And that's about it.

        It's a short-term fix for a longer-term problem that they are obviously aware of. Rather than government stupidity, perhaps it is a judicious use of available resources?

        (Apparently the filter thinks my comment looks too much like ascii art. Odd.)

        Genius

    • As a programmer, I can say, depending on the complexity of the system this may have been the easier option from their PoV. Porting poorly written Flash code to anything else is hard. That said, they should have given Ruffle a try. Probably would have been a simpler option, if they had known about it, and if it works for their site.
    • I kinda thought it was ingenious. As long as the browser goes to one site only.
    • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @01:45AM (#61014402)

      Is this really all that much worse than an Electron app? They're pretty similar at a fundamental level - packaging up an entire browser for the purpose of running a single app.

      • Yes. At least with Electron you're packing an entire browser to run an only slightly outdated javascript engine. Now if you built an Electron app to support Flash even those electrons would stop spinning, turn to you and say "WTF are you doing. STOP!"

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      That Flash based web form represents thousands of man-hours of sunk cost. No manager is going to sign off on replacing it with two lines of HTML5 you wrote in 5 minutes.

    • The Euronext exchange(s) have done something similar, though instead of releasing their own browser they now run flash inside a container on an old browser since they won't bother to recreate their file service in straight html. So this shit is happening in the enterprise as well.
    • The problem is that legislators and taxpayers don't want to hear "we should allocate funds every year to steadily and incrementally keeping all our systems up to date with the latest developments in technology because that is what is cheapest as well as most effective in the long run."

      They want to hear how low you've kept the budget this year and we'll deal with problems when they reach a crisis point and then we'll try some band-aids while we hold an "investigation" into why something wasn't done before, p

  • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

    So they named their agency with the Acronym SARS. And now they are suffering a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that is more contagious, and potentially higher mortality, than a lot of strains out there. I get that itâ(TM)s coincidental, but I think Id change the name the same way you say - I hate rabbits - around a campfire.

  • So ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:52PM (#61013688)

    the browser is only available for Windows users and not for other operating systems such as macOS, Linux, and mobile users

    ... if I run Linux, I can get out of paying taxes?

    • No, if you can't file online, you would have to complete submission on paper forms. Paper-based filing has an earlier deadline, so if you only realise when trying to file online, you would have to also pay a penalty. Also, South Africa's public services aren't very well run, so filing on paper will probably require spending 2 days waiting to be served at a SARS office.

  • by kenwd0elq ( 985465 ) <kenwd0elq@engineer.com> on Sunday January 31, 2021 @08:12PM (#61013730)

    Why write your own browser, when Waterfox Classic still supports Flash? It's intended for Flash games, but would probably work for the SA government.

  • I demand the right to file my taxes using cuneiform clay tablets!

    What's good enough for the bronze age is good enough for me!

  • Governments and large companies are full of "apps" like this. They were built 10+ years ago by the lowest bidder Indian outsourcing firm and the company/agency policy of outsourcing everything means no one on staff can fix things anymore. I've seen this over and over again in 20+ years of systems integration work.

    They'll probably hire someone to rewrite it for Silverlight (because that hasn't been blocked yet...) rather than develop the in-house expertise. This is what makes me worry about the future of dev

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      There's plenty of stuff that was built 10+ years ago and still works today. The problem is not that the code is old, it's the fact that it was written to depend on a proprietary system where the only vendor of that system has chosen to discontinue it. I have standard html based apps from the 90s which aside from looking ugly continue to work in the newest browsers today.

    • > They'll probably hire someone to rewrite it for Silverlight

      You win Slashdot for today.

    • by v1 ( 525388 )

      it might be a bit pessimistic to say that - it's also quite possible that it was just written in-house years ago and the only ones that truly understood it have moved on, and the department managers have just been praying it stays working until they can retire. SURPRISE!

      Happens a lot in the industry. Sadly, the better the code, the more damaging the end result. Bad code is easy to justify replacing. Good code, code that works perfectly and does exactly what you need it to do, is much harder to justify s

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      ....but when you think about it objectively, your agency needs to keep collecting taxes; there's no "oh, let's spend 6 months fixing it,"

      Considering they had three and a half years of notice, you are wrong. They could have very comfortably afforded to spend six months fixing it with 3 years to spare.

      Saying writing their own browser was the best bad choice they had left because of their procrastination is like saying that telling your engaged daughter to marry someone else because her fiancee died the day

  • Well, not never. But technological dept is something that is going to eat a lot of companies in the next decades. Doing IT on the cheap does not only have massive negative impact on security, some tech will simply stop working at some time.

  • Only thing worse would be an AIDS portal.
  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @10:04PM (#61013910)

    You see, Adobe offloaded flash support to a company called Harman (a subsidiary of Samsung), especially for big entities, not individual people like us, let alone Joe Sixpack and Jane the plumber.

    One of the offical methods that Harman uses to keep Flash going is:

    "PACKAGED BROWSER SOLUTION

    Where enterprise applications are a mixture of web (HTML/JavaScript) and Flash (or Flex) content, AIR is unlikely to provide full capabilities and so HARMAN is offering the “Packaged Browser" solution as a customised software product that can be licensed for use beyond end of 2020 and allows an existing Flash-based web application to continue working like before.

    The “Packaged Browser" is essentially an application that wraps up a browser engine along with the Flash Player and is locked to your web-based Flash application taking on appropriate branding. It is deployed as a separate application, so it needs to be installed by an end user and accessed as a desktop application. It is like a browser tab without the navigational UI and with a Flash Player isolated from the rest of the system.

    This application works by loading in the appropriate browser engine and directing this to the predefined URL that hosts the web-based application. The browser engine then loads the custom version of the Flash Player as provided under license by HARMAN. The web-based application is then displayed as if it were running in a normal web page."
    https://services.harman.com/pa... [harman.com]

    So, what it seems happened here was:
    Instead fo being stupid like the Chinese Train IT Guys, the IT guys at the South African Revenue Service did the right thing and contacted Harman in advance, and got a propper interim solution going.

    Would have been better to start coding for web standards as soon as Adobe gave a deadline in July 2017? Maybe yes. Maybe not.
    Maybe, at that point, the standards AND BROWSERS of the era did not had all what was needed to replace flash. Now, in Jan 2021, certainly all browsers do, but one has to go back to 2017 to see.
    Or maybe, they were working on a transition, and got sidelined by something, perhaps like a virus, and missed their deadline.
    Or perhaps they have been underfunded for years.
    Or perhaps they had bigger fish to fry (reblacing some lines of COBOL from their backend perhaps? ;-) )

    In any case, what is a total fail is the SARS not issuing a Press release saying somethig along the lines of "due to XYZ, we have not been able to complete our transition from Flash to HTML5+CCS3, therefore, we got official support from Harman, as per Adobe, and are releasing the Official Haman Browser solution while we complete our migration". Instead, they decided to remain silent, and become a meme...

    Peace.

  • A lot of orgs don't make any effort to fix things until they break.
    It's been known for several years that flash support would be discontinued, you had 3+ years to plan and execute a transition.

    The same thing happens with all manner of other technologies. EOL operating systems - the support dates are well known and published years in advance, yet many places fail to plan in advance and end up caught out with unsupported systems. Things like TLS, many places have not yet deployed TLS1.3 and probably won't do

  • South Africa Revenue Service releases Flash enabled browser? Aka a SARS virus? Must be that new strain.

  • by buchanmilne ( 258619 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @01:19AM (#61014350) Homepage

    > As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets.

    The actual tweet says "SARS is aware of certain forms not loading correctly due to Adobe Flash.".

    It doesn't say that all tax filing is affected.

    Actually, October 2020 was the first time I haven't needed Flash to submit my personal taxes to SARS. For the past few years I have had to use Chrome, and in 2019 also jump through some hoops in Chrome to enable Flash, to submit my personal tax information, but this year I could just use Firefox.

    There are other tax types that are impacted, but not all tax filing is impacted.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Pretty common in large corporations too. My favorite example is my current car loan. 90-Day password expiration even though I only log in once a month. Each password only gets used 3 times.

  • But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial

    Ok for the time, however porting from Flash+ActionScript to HTML and JS does not seem like a trivial task to do.

  • Why no free Flash? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:33AM (#61014646) Homepage Journal

    I wonder, why is there no free Flash implementation. Possibly not 100% compatible but with most dangerous features removed.

    HTML5 doesn't cut it. Making an animation in it is nothing approaching the ease of Adobe Flash. You could make complex Flash animations with zero coding background and without writing a single line of code. It had something that is sorely lacking in all current apps that are used to make animations - any animation could be converted to an object, and then animated further while retaining the original cycle. Want to have a guy walk a path across the screen? Make a walk cycle animation, save as object, add a path that slides the object across the screen, fine-tune the speed to match walk speed so feet don't slip. Save the scene as object, paste it into frame of a screen in a different scene, you can zoom, pan, the guy walks the same. all the transformations pass through seamlessly.

    I can't find anything with this sort of ease of use. There is no replacement for Flash. Why?

    • Well, you can make animation with the HTML blink tag also.
    • HTML5 doesn't cut it. Making an animation in it is nothing approaching the ease of Adobe Flash. You could make complex Flash animations with zero coding background and without writing a single line of code.

      I thought Adobe added HTML5 export around when it renamed Flash to Adobe Animate CC.

    • Now we're going to have to have tax forms with no walking animations. Thanks, Adobe!

  • by codeButcher ( 223668 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:16AM (#61014752)

    I was under the impression that that website used PDF forms. But it might have been the case a few years back... I've worked at the contracting house doing work on the SARS project, even got security clearance and moved to the project, but then got yanked to another project before touching it. Not even sure if they're still on it.

    In the mean time, I don't have taxes to declare for the coming tax year :-)

  • SARS still absolutely intends to move away from Flash, but they stuffed up and didn't get it done in time. They actually got the tax filing for individuals done last year, as well as a lot of other commonly used forms, but still had other use cases to complete.

    Although it's entirely due to their own incompetence, given the predicament they found themselves in, can anyone here suggest another fix which would allow organisations to file their monthly taxes in just a matter of weeks?
    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Three and a half years wasn't enough time???

      This is incompetence to the point that they *DESERVE* to lose money.

      What they should be doing is charging no interest for anyone who files late this year, allowing people to carry a balance forward into next year with no penalty.

      Because this kind of negligence is *ENTIRELY* on them.

  • The sad thing is that the South African Tax Payers cannot even blame the Zuptas for this.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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