Simon Willison's Weblog: flash

NYT Flash-based visualizations work again

2024-01-21T05:58:18+00:00

NYT Flash-based visualizations work again

The New York Times are using the open source Ruffle Flash emulator - built using Rust, compiled to WebAssembly - to get their old archived data visualization interactives working again.

Tags: archives, flash, new-york-times, rust, webassembly

Quoting Apple Daily

2021-01-22T00:30:37+00:00

Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.

Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

— Apple Daily

Tags: flash

Internet Archive Software Library: Flash

2020-11-19T21:19:51+00:00

Internet Archive Software Library: Flash

A fantastic new initiative from the Internet Archive: they’re now archiving Flash (.swf) files and serving them for modern browsers using Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. They are fully interactive and audio works too. Considering the enormous quantity of creative material released in Flash over the decades this helps fill a big hole in the Internet’s cultural memory.

Via Jason Scott

Tags: flash, internet-archive, jason-scott, rust, webassembly

2020 Web Milestones

2020-01-24T04:43:16+00:00

2020 Web Milestones

A lot of stuff is happening in 2020! Mike Sherov rounds it up—highlights include the release of Chromium Edge (Microsoft’s Chrome-powered browser for Windows 7+), Web Components supported in every major browser, Deno 1.x, SameSite Cookies turned on by default (which should dramatically reduce CSRF exposure) and Python 2 and Flash EOLs.

Via @mikesherov

Tags: chrome, csrf, flash, internet-explorer, javascript, python, web, deno, samesite

CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over

2011-02-10T22:07:00+00:00

CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over

Here’s the exploit that Django and Rails both just released fixes for. It’s actually a flaw in the Flash player. Flash isn’t meant to be able to make cross-domain HTTP requests with custom HTTP headers unless the crossdomain.xml file on the other domain allows them to, but it turns out a 307 redirect (like a 302, but allows POST data to be forwarded) confuses the Flash player in to not checking the crossdomain.xml on the host it is being redirect to.

Tags: crossdomainxml, csrf, django, flash, rails, security, recovered

tobeytailor's gordon

2010-05-29T11:57:00+00:00

tobeytailor's gordon

Another Flash runtime in pure JavaScript project, released back in January. Not quite as advanced as Smokescreen yet (it doesn’t have an audio implementation) but already available as open source under an MIT license.

Tags: flash, javascript, open-source, recovered, gordon, mitlicense, tobeytailor

Smokescreen demo: a Flash player in JavaScript

2010-05-29T11:32:00+00:00

Smokescreen demo: a Flash player in JavaScript

Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

Open up the Chrome Web Inspector while the demo is running and you can see the SVG changing in real time. Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter!

It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics).

The company behind it have announced plans to open source it in the near future. My one concern is performance—the library is 175 KB and over 8,000 lines of JavaScript which might cause problems on low powered mobile devices.

Tags: datauri, flash, javascript, svg, recovered, chris-smoak, smokescreen

Realtime Election Tweets

2010-05-06T21:20:00+00:00

Realtime Election Tweets

Jay Caines-Gooby’s realtime election tweet service, using Node.js, nginx and WebSocket with a Flash fallback.

Tags: comet, flash, javascript, nodejs, realtime, twitter, websockets, recovered, election, jay-caines-gooby

Quoting Rafe Colburn

2010-05-05T12:10:00+00:00

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

— Rafe Colburn

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, ipad, iphone, iphoneos, rafe-colburn, recovered

Quoting Steve Jobs

2010-04-29T15:22:06+00:00

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

— Steve Jobs

Tags: flash, adobe, apple, steve-jobs, mobile

Quoting Louis Gerbarg

2010-04-12T17:24:27+00:00

Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.

— Louis Gerbarg

Tags: apple, ipad, iphone, louisgerbarg, flash

Quoting FXG 1.0 Specification

2010-04-11T18:58:01+00:00

"... the interchange format needed to be able to support future Flash Player features, which would not necessarily map to SVG features. As such, the decision was made to go with a new interchange format, FXG, instead of having a non-standard implementation of SVG. FXG does borrow from SVG whenever possible."

— FXG 1.0 Specification

Tags: svg, fxg, flash, adobe

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

2010-04-11T18:33:01+00:00

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad.

Tags: adobe, canvas, flash, fxg, html5, illustrator, ipad, iphone

flashblockdetector

2010-03-13T10:44:58+00:00

flashblockdetector

Mark Pilgrim’s JavaScript library for detecting if the user has a Flash blocker enabled, such as FlashBlock for Firefox and Chrome or ClickToFlash for Safari. One good use of this would be to inform users that they need to opt-in to Flash for unobtrusive Flash enhancements (such as invisible audio players) to work on that page.

Tags: clicktoflash, flash, flashblock, javascript, mark-pilgrim

ClearMaps: A Mapping Framework for Data Visualization

2010-02-28T15:52:04+00:00

ClearMaps: A Mapping Framework for Data Visualization

An open source library for map visualisations using ActionScript, with an Adobe AIR based encoding tool for translating data from shapefiles in to vector data suitable for use with the library.

Tags: clearmaps, flash, mapping, visualisations

HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback

2010-02-11T17:49:08+00:00

HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback

Everything you need to know about embedding HTML5 video on a page, complete with multiple codecs to cover the various supporting browsers and a fallback to Flash.

Tags: flash, html5, niall-kennedy, video

Plupload

2010-02-10T12:53:11+00:00

Plupload

Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing and drag-and-drop from the desktop. It achieves all of this by providing backends for Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 and Browserplus and picking the most capable available option.

Via Moxiecode Developer Blog

Tags: browserplus, flash, gears, html5, javascript, plupload, silverlight, tinymce, uploads

Quoting Emmy Huang

2010-02-07T10:21:25+00:00

As has been pointed out by the community, there is an existing crash bug that was reported by Matthew Dempsky in the Flash Player bugbase (JIRA FP-677) in September of 2008 that still exists in the release players. It is fixed in Flash Player 10.1 beta, and has been since we launched the beta in early November 2009. [...] So what happened here? We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch.

— Emmy Huang, PM for Flash Player

Tags: flash, crashing, kevin-lynch, orly

Quoting Kevin Lynch

2010-02-07T10:19:19+00:00

Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.

— Kevin Lynch

Tags: flash, crashing, kevin-lynch, orly

SublimeVideo - HTML5 Video Player

2010-02-02T09:50:43+00:00

SublimeVideo - HTML5 Video Player

Still a fair way to go (no Firefox support yet, and they plan to add a Flash fallback for IE) but in Safari this is pretty extraordinary. Smooth video, beautiful UI, full window mode and full screen mode in the latest WebKit nightlies. I’d go as far as saying that this is the nicest online video implementation I’ve seen (at least on the Mac).

Tags: flash, html5, safari, video, webkit

Quoting John Gruber

2010-01-31T12:05:40+00:00

32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, flash, apple, adobe

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

2010-01-31T12:05:23+00:00

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.”

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, ipad, iphone, john-gruber

flXHR

2009-11-26T12:52:16+00:00

flXHR

I was looking for something like this recently, glad to see it exists. flXHR is a drop-in replacement for regular XMLHttpRequest which uses an invisible Flash shim to allow cross-domain calls to be made, taking advantage of the Flash crossdomain.xml security model.

Tags: ajax, crossdomain, flash, flxhr, javascript, swf, xhr

Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player

2009-11-05T16:24:02+00:00

Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player

One of the best explanations of the security implications of crossdomain.xml files I’ve seen. If you host a crossdomain.xml file with allow-access-from domain=“*” and don’t understand all of the points described here, you probably have a nasty security vulnerability.

Tags: adobe, crossdomainxml, flash, security

Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, millions of accounts exploitable

2009-11-05T09:47:49+00:00

Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, millions of accounts exploitable

Amazingly, both services had wide open holes in their crossdomain.xml files. Facebook were serving allow-access-from-domain=“*” in the crossdomain.xml file on one of their subdomains (a subdomain that still had access to the user’s profile information) while MySpace were opting in farm.sproutbuilder.com, a service which allowed anyone to upload arbitrary SWF files.

Via TechCrunch

Tags: crossdomainxml, facebook, flash, myspace, security, swf

Adobe is Bad for Open Government

2009-11-01T12:51:20+00:00

Adobe is Bad for Open Government

The problem isn’t just that PDFs are a bad way of sharing data, it’s that Adobe have been actively lobbying the US government to use their PDF and Flash formats for open government initiatives.

Tags: adobe, flash, opengovernment, pdf, sunlightfoundation

Quoting John Gruber

2009-10-06T07:33:28+00:00

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, flash, adobe, iphone, apple

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash

2009-10-05T21:15:45+00:00

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash

A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well.

Tags: actionscript, adobe, compilers, flash, hacking, iphone, llvm

svgweb

2009-08-22T22:42:12+00:00

svgweb

Awesome. I’ve been having a lot of fun with SVG for dynamic graphics recently (maps in particular), and hoping someone builds an SVG renderer in Flash so I could serve up SVG files for IE. Brad Neuberg and team have done exactly that.

Tags: brad-neuberg, flash, svg, svgweb

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

2009-08-17T15:23:32+00:00

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

Flash cookies last longer than browser cookies and are harder to delete. Some services are sneakily “respawning” their cookies—if you clear the regular tracking cookie it will be reinstated from the Flash data next time you visit a page.

Via Bruce Schneier

Tags: cookies, flash, privacy, respawning, security