5 ms·

While millions of kids are doing remote learning? That seems like a terrible idea, there is tons of educational sites using flash.

by kgwxd 6y ago

tester756 6y ago
How much time did they have to update? How much they have to wait just because kids have math to do? Teachers can work around it
ceejayoz 6y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Flash needs to go away, for sure, but my kids' teachers have still been assigning Flash websites as school tasks - "play this educational game" sort of stuff - in recent months.
- muhahue 6y ago
  My teachers are also using Flash-enabled sites for their quiz and presentation :( This is simply because the site owners haven't moved on yet for some unknown reasons.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > for some unknown reasons ka-ching educational and government contracts need disruption and this is a symptom
    - egypturnash 6y ago
      Where "disruption" means "waste a bunch of time and money for people to rebuild something that worked perfectly fine until the entire platform it was built on went belly-up"? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent.
      - trthomps 6y ago
        Maybe building on proprietary platforms was a bad idea from the start and a poor investment of public resources.
        Laforet 6y ago
        Back in the early 2000s there were no equivalent to flash in terms of features and ease of use. It's bordering on whig history criticising people back then for not going FOSS
      - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
        > I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent. Oh, it was broken alright. From a security perspective, Flash was a nightmare to the extent that you almost had to wonder if Adobe was making it vulnerable on purpose. By using Flash today, organizations are putting themselves and their users at serious risk. Ransomware, identity theft, all of the bad things. School children would be an easy target for hackers to gain access to the parents computer, so it's especially appalling that learning software is still using Flash. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Well, that problem will quickly fix itself because now that will just not work and there is no workaround. And coincidentally that is why you need to make sure there is 100% no workaround.
spijdar 6y ago
Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash, though I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, while it'll suck, maybe a lot, if there are businesses still selling/offering flash-based products, they need to change, immediately. I'm sympathetic to people who want to keep flash around to play games or experience the "old web", but education and enterprise still requiring flash for <x> is beyond absurd at this point, as long as it's been deprecated and Adobe has been ringing the death bell. Maybe this isn't a fair sentiment either, but I feel like both teachers and students would benefit from upgrading to a product that doesn't require flash. I know it's more complicated than that, but geeze.
- lazulicurio 6y ago
  > Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash My mom is a school teachers and a lot of the web materials provided for their curriculum are still flash-based. Although the publishers have started to transition, the older flash apps tend to be richer in content and less buggy.
floatingatoll 6y ago
They'll never stop using Flash until it's taken away from them, because there's no financial pressure upon them to invest in ongoing maintenance and upgrades otherwise. This is also going to break a massive chunk of the food permit and driver's ed markets overnight.
- fuzxi 6y ago
  Well, overnight after years of warnings, anyway.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    They knew and they chose not to prepare, so while I regret that normal people are being punished here, I certainly have no sympathy whatsoever for the companies that chose not to act.
- sbuk 6y ago
  It’s not overnight. Much like the removal of 32bit apps on macOS, this was mentioned time and again. Not paying attention to soft wear that you’re business depends on is not an excuse, neither is “thinking of the children”.
duxup 6y ago
It's not like we didn't know it was going... whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it? It has been a LONG time we knew this was coming, anyone still using it, I don't know what could make them switch outside breaking changes.
- iso1210 6y ago
  I've got flash based devices in foreign offices that were due for upgrade or replacement this year, which has been..... shall we say challenging?
- jobigoud 6y ago
  > whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it? It's still a hard pill that a finished and working interactive resource has to be rewritten from the ground up in a different technology after years of working unattended. There is a big free interactive course to learn Catalan from beginner to advanced entirely in Flash at parla.cat. Hundreds of lessons/exercises, it's been working by itself for years.
r00fus 6y ago
None of my machines use flash nor do my 3 kids have flash-based apps. I'd like to know what these sites are...
- rvanmil 6y ago
  Here you go: https://ambrasoft.nl/ambrasoft-school/ https://ambrasoft.nl/ambrasoft-school/ It is utterly ridiculous, this company is still selling their Flash crap to primary schools. They are part of Noordhoff, the largest publisher of the education system in The Netherlands. My 4yo son has an iPad but for home schooling due to COVID we had to install Chrome with Flash and teach him how to work with that on a laptop.
dasd2 6y ago
newgrounds is known for hosting flash animations. They created their own flash player desktop app so you can keep watching content that was flash based : https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
- anthk 6y ago
  Flash animations are easily converted into webm/mp4/mkv/put any video container here.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    Flash animations could mix bitmap and vector resources. No video container can offer artifact-free scaling of vector resources.
    - anthk 6y ago
      If they are standalone they may work perfectly under Gnash/Lightspark, unlike games using external assets and lots of quirks.
  - ThatPlayer 6y ago
    There's a neat program to handle that too: https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel
m-p-3 6y ago
And the onus is on those educational sites to transition away from Flash. We knew for several YEARS it's being decommissioned. If these websites needed a disrupting event to nudge the transition, then this is it.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  These educational sites are probably dead - writing educational material is exhausting and not free.
drzaiusapelord 6y ago
>Microsoft and Google are planning to disable Flash Player in their Chromium-based web browsers, but no official word has been given as to when this will happen. So you have two copies of flash on your Win10 computer. One is an OS library that you can see a bit of in the control panel. This is what Microsoft is removing with this update. The other is a containerized copy that Chrome and Edge ships with. That copy isn't going away until MS and Google say so, and if their metrics say there's a lot of flash use, then its going to stay for a while, maybe forever as a whitelist-only legacy technology. Its kinda this already, but I'm guessing it could be stricter, like forcing people to go deep into a menu to activate flash instead of helpfully popping up about it.
- skymt 6y ago
  MS and Google have already said so. Flash will be blocked from loading in every version of Chrome next month, and the next version of Chrome to ship will remove all Flash support entirely from the codebase. Chromium-based Edge will follow suit. https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removing-flash-microsoft-edge-internet-explorer/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removi...
  - wolco2 6y ago
    Is firefox safe from the purge?
    - kaszanka 6y ago
      No. Firefox will drop support for the Flash plugin with Firefox 85 (January 26, 2021), but there's a cutoff date of January 12, 2021 in the plugin itself, after which it will not work even in earlier versions of Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash
TwoBit 6y ago
Those sites have had 5-10 years' warning. Some things need to die and the benefit to everyone outweighs the needs of a few. If Flash wasn't killed then people keep writing for it.
stretchcat 6y ago
The kids will be fine. It's their teachers who will need to do more work to find new resources and update their lesson plans.
chapium 6y ago
Many have moved on to html5.

While millions of kids are doing remote learning? That seems like a terrible idea, there is tons of educational sites using flash.

by kgwxd 6y ago

While millions of kids are doing remote learning? That seems like a terrible idea, there is tons of educational sites using flash.

tester756 6y ago

How much time did they have to update? How much they have to wait just because kids have math to do? Teachers can work around it

ceejayoz 6y ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Flash needs to go away, for sure, but my kids' teachers have still been assigning Flash websites as school tasks - "play this educational game" sort of stuff - in recent months.

muhahue 6y ago
My teachers are also using Flash-enabled sites for their quiz and presentation :( This is simply because the site owners haven't moved on yet for some unknown reasons.
- vmception 6y ago
  > for some unknown reasons ka-ching educational and government contracts need disruption and this is a symptom
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Where "disruption" means "waste a bunch of time and money for people to rebuild something that worked perfectly fine until the entire platform it was built on went belly-up"? I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent.
    - trthomps 6y ago
      Maybe building on proprietary platforms was a bad idea from the start and a poor investment of public resources.
      - Laforet 6y ago
        Back in the early 2000s there were no equivalent to flash in terms of features and ease of use. It's bordering on whig history criticising people back then for not going FOSS
    - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
      > I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent. Oh, it was broken alright. From a security perspective, Flash was a nightmare to the extent that you almost had to wonder if Adobe was making it vulnerable on purpose. By using Flash today, organizations are putting themselves and their users at serious risk. Ransomware, identity theft, all of the bad things. School children would be an easy target for hackers to gain access to the parents computer, so it's especially appalling that learning software is still using Flash. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...
tinus_hn 6y ago
Well, that problem will quickly fix itself because now that will just not work and there is no workaround. And coincidentally that is why you need to make sure there is 100% no workaround.

spijdar 6y ago

Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash, though I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, while it'll suck, maybe a lot, if there are businesses still selling/offering flash-based products, they need to change, immediately. I'm sympathetic to people who want to keep flash around to play games or experience the "old web", but education and enterprise still requiring flash for <x> is beyond absurd at this point, as long as it's been deprecated and Adobe has been ringing the death bell. Maybe this isn't a fair sentiment either, but I feel like both teachers and students would benefit from upgrading to a product that doesn't require flash. I know it's more complicated than that, but geeze.

lazulicurio 6y ago
> Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash My mom is a school teachers and a lot of the web materials provided for their curriculum are still flash-based. Although the publishers have started to transition, the older flash apps tend to be richer in content and less buggy.

floatingatoll 6y ago

They'll never stop using Flash until it's taken away from them, because there's no financial pressure upon them to invest in ongoing maintenance and upgrades otherwise. This is also going to break a massive chunk of the food permit and driver's ed markets overnight.

fuzxi 6y ago
Well, overnight after years of warnings, anyway.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  They knew and they chose not to prepare, so while I regret that normal people are being punished here, I certainly have no sympathy whatsoever for the companies that chose not to act.
sbuk 6y ago
It’s not overnight. Much like the removal of 32bit apps on macOS, this was mentioned time and again. Not paying attention to soft wear that you’re business depends on is not an excuse, neither is “thinking of the children”.

duxup 6y ago

It's not like we didn't know it was going... whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it? It has been a LONG time we knew this was coming, anyone still using it, I don't know what could make them switch outside breaking changes.

iso1210 6y ago
I've got flash based devices in foreign offices that were due for upgrade or replacement this year, which has been..... shall we say challenging?
jobigoud 6y ago
> whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it? It's still a hard pill that a finished and working interactive resource has to be rewritten from the ground up in a different technology after years of working unattended. There is a big free interactive course to learn Catalan from beginner to advanced entirely in Flash at parla.cat. Hundreds of lessons/exercises, it's been working by itself for years.

r00fus 6y ago

None of my machines use flash nor do my 3 kids have flash-based apps. I'd like to know what these sites are...

rvanmil 6y ago
Here you go: https://ambrasoft.nl/ambrasoft-school/ https://ambrasoft.nl/ambrasoft-school/ It is utterly ridiculous, this company is still selling their Flash crap to primary schools. They are part of Noordhoff, the largest publisher of the education system in The Netherlands. My 4yo son has an iPad but for home schooling due to COVID we had to install Chrome with Flash and teach him how to work with that on a laptop.

dasd2 6y ago

newgrounds is known for hosting flash animations. They created their own flash player desktop app so you can keep watching content that was flash based : https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player

anthk 6y ago
Flash animations are easily converted into webm/mp4/mkv/put any video container here.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  Flash animations could mix bitmap and vector resources. No video container can offer artifact-free scaling of vector resources.
  - anthk 6y ago
    If they are standalone they may work perfectly under Gnash/Lightspark, unlike games using external assets and lots of quirks.
- ThatPlayer 6y ago
  There's a neat program to handle that too: https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel

m-p-3 6y ago

And the onus is on those educational sites to transition away from Flash. We knew for several YEARS it's being decommissioned. If these websites needed a disrupting event to nudge the transition, then this is it.

mhh__ 6y ago
These educational sites are probably dead - writing educational material is exhausting and not free.

drzaiusapelord 6y ago

>Microsoft and Google are planning to disable Flash Player in their Chromium-based web browsers, but no official word has been given as to when this will happen. So you have two copies of flash on your Win10 computer. One is an OS library that you can see a bit of in the control panel. This is what Microsoft is removing with this update. The other is a containerized copy that Chrome and Edge ships with. That copy isn't going away until MS and Google say so, and if their metrics say there's a lot of flash use, then its going to stay for a while, maybe forever as a whitelist-only legacy technology. Its kinda this already, but I'm guessing it could be stricter, like forcing people to go deep into a menu to activate flash instead of helpfully popping up about it.

skymt 6y ago
MS and Google have already said so. Flash will be blocked from loading in every version of Chrome next month, and the next version of Chrome to ship will remove all Flash support entirely from the codebase. Chromium-based Edge will follow suit. https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removing-flash-microsoft-edge-internet-explorer/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removi...
- wolco2 6y ago
  Is firefox safe from the purge?
  - kaszanka 6y ago
    No. Firefox will drop support for the Flash plugin with Firefox 85 (January 26, 2021), but there's a cutoff date of January 12, 2021 in the plugin itself, after which it will not work even in earlier versions of Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash

TwoBit 6y ago

Those sites have had 5-10 years' warning. Some things need to die and the benefit to everyone outweighs the needs of a few. If Flash wasn't killed then people keep writing for it.

stretchcat 6y ago

The kids will be fine. It's their teachers who will need to do more work to find new resources and update their lesson plans.

chapium 6y ago

Many have moved on to html5.