I don't think I like that. Yes, using Flash in a web browser once it has stopped receiving security updates is a bad idea, but what if you need to view a website in the Wayback Machine which incorporates flash, and you've set up an isolated VM for the purpose? I suppose you could set the VM's clock back, but that's a major PITA which could potentially cause other issues.
The existence of Flash Projector softens the blow significantly, but there will be some content that must be viewed within a web browser. Perhaps an earlier version of Flash Player lacks the kill switch?
Conveniently, given that any Flash content published as SWF was probably authored at least 10 years ago, you could very likely get away with using such an older version of Flash to view such sites.
Rather than tracking one down yourself, I'd suggest, for best compatibility, just using a VM of an OS that ships with an older version of Flash. For example, later releases of Windows XP.
That's what the blog One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/) uses to generate its screenshots, and they almost always work.
FWIW, Ruffle appears to be able to play Flash content within a web browser: https://ruffle.rs/demo/
Like breaking TLS cert validity date checks.
Though, I suppose if some website hasn't migrated off Flash by 2020, it's probably reasonably likely to also be in the subset of websites that haven't implements https by now as well...
The copyright stance on breaking DMCA for preservation is far more clear when the original owner is explicitly dropping support.
What are you talking about?
Disclaimer: I am an Adobe employee, but have no insider information about this.
There are 893 vulnerabilities listed of severity 9.0 or greater, such as remote code execution and similarly dire problems. Flash may have been innovative, but from a security perspective it's hot garbage and it's long past time to get rid of it.
Flash was a true enabler and was supposed to be replaced by HTML5 which has never fulfilled its intended purpose.
Security was never a problem as that could be dealt with by having access source code and fixing the bugs in it, and that didn't stop Google from continue to ship it years after it got deprecated.
Its even more amazing how Mozilla couldn't succeed or abandoned their effort to create a flashplayer, yet ruffle.rs is creating a Flashplayer in both the Rust language and the web assembly system created by Mozilla.
It apparently never occurred to Mozilla that they could write the Flashplayer in C and compile it in Web Assembly.
Expected behaviour from a company ever so reluctant to bite the hand that feeds it.
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.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...
At work we have to shut down two of our older web tools because of this. We're too small to put resources in fixing. They were old and he didn't port to javascript. (It wasn't non-trivial, you could draw a box around some points and it would pass that data along via ajax.)
Browser gaming has never recovered.
