10 ms·

Adobe uses DMCA to nuke project that keeps Flash alive, secure and adware free

303 points by CTOSian 5y ago

p1mrx 5y ago
Oh good, they're not going after https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ -- that project is a much better idea than repackaging old Adobe binaries.
- maverwa 5y ago
  thats what I was thinking as well when I read the title. Good to hear its not about ruffle.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Yes. Is there a non-Adobe authoring tool for Flash that's still around?
    - ZeikJT 5y ago
      Depends on your use case, some game dev tools still export to swf. Like Haxe: https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/compiler-targets.html https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/compiler-targets... https://haxe.org/manual/target-flash-getting-started.html https://haxe.org/manual/target-flash-getting-started.html
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  They're actually up-to-date Adobe binaries as the article says that Adobe's Chinese Flash subsidiary still maintains Flash and releases security updates for it each month. > The Chinese version of Flash receives one security update per month and can be freely downloaded from Flash.cn but also has significant strings attached. It comes preinstalled with an adware program called Flash Helper which, according to security sources, exhibits malicious behavior. Developed by ‘darktohka’ and previously located on Github, Clean Flash Installer solves these problems and more. > “Clean Flash Installer installs this up-to-date freely available version of Flash, but it comes WITHOUT the adware program,” darktohka informs TorrentFreak.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    I will never understand the perversion of walling off security updates behind paywalls or geographic walls.
    - zeruch 5y ago
      ...depending on your legal department, it might be to ward off out of geo liabilities or expectations of support (whether actual or simply perceived).
      - chuckee 5y ago
        I've never heard of a company being held liable for releasing even a paid product with defective security, let alone a free one. They're not even held liable for deliberately including spyware [1]! That any lawyer would believe a company would be held liable for releasing an imperfect security patch is beyond absurd, and nothing more than a convenient excuse for abusive practices. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-smart-tv-snooping-extends-to-home-networks-second-blogger-says/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...
- TravisHusky 5y ago
  That looks like a sweet project. I'm happy to see web assembly being used in it too. I'll have to add it my long list of things I want to get around to tinkering with.
  - db48x 5y ago
    https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger
grishka 5y ago
One thing I can't understand is why Adobe is so insistent on keeping Flash really actually dead by saying it's "unsupported" yet still keeping the sources to themselves. If they aren't gaining anything from it anyway, why can't they just open-source it? I mean they won't lose anything either by doing that, right? The community would fix all the bugs eventually. Probably quicker and better than Adobe, too.
- kvark 5y ago
  Doesn't give them anything. Even adds some risks that people sue them for copyright infringement. E.g. from using GPL projects.
  - grishka 5y ago
    > E.g. from using GPL projects. Interesting — I just checked the standalone flash player I still have (and use sometimes), the "about" window doesn't list any free software. So either they aren't using any, or... But I find it unlikely that a company with this many lawyers would not read every letter of the license of every library they include in any of their projects.
    - georgemcbay 5y ago
      I've worked with the Flash Player source code in the far off past (I worked for a company called Chumby which licensed Adobe's Flash Player to power apps running in a device similar to the modern Amazon Dash Look) and while you would see things in that codebase that make your head spin, improper use of GPL libraries was not one of them.
- cylon13 5y ago
  As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. I don't think it's necessarily true to say they have nothing to lose by open-sourcing it though. Who knows how many private shared libraries are in there that are still required by other still-active Adobe software. And they're also probably not excited to give up rights to a massive pile of code which they could conceivably want to use in future projects. In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)
jimbob45 5y ago
Is it not still possible to run an outdated browser version with Flash installed in a container? Don't get me wrong, that's a hassle but at least it's not lights out for Flash for these people.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Why stop there? You could virtualize an outdated operating system with an outdated browser.
  - cardosof 5y ago
    You can buy old hardware and have the whole vintage web experience!
    - EamonnMR 5y ago
      With great difficulty now, due to pervasive HTTPS
      - remexre 5y ago
        I'm now imagining an old beige-box desktop with a Raspberry Pi acting as a de-HTTPS proxy... with more compute power than the desktop
        EamonnMR 5y ago
        People definitely do this
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Ooh, I don't think I've ever visited a Flash site with HTTPS.
quotz 5y ago
On another note, Adobe keeps downloading bloatware on my laptop anytime I open creative cloud. Such a disappointment they’ve become
particulars02 5y ago
Why do we want to keep Flash alive?
- rzzzt 5y ago
  So that Ferry Halim's Orisinal page does not have to show this message instead of presenting you with wonderful games: https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
- jjj123 5y ago
  There’s a lot of original content (animations and games mostly) that only lives in .swf format. It would be nice to keep flash around if just for archival purposes.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  Maybe you want to play/watch the thousands of Flash games/animations that exist? Use legacy software that depends on Flash? I agree that it's an insecure piece of crap that shouldn't be used in any modern system, but that doesn't mean that everyone should be restricted from trying to use old software that depends on it, as long as they asume the security risks of doing so.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Strong Bad. Probably Badger Badger Badger and some games, but mostly Strong Bad.
  - iKnowKungFoo 5y ago
    Strong Bad lives on YouTube now. https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom/featured https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom/featured
    - squeaky-clean 5y ago
      There's no interactive elements on YouTube though. I'm sure 99% of viewers don't really care, but it's not entirely the same.
seanieb 5y ago
“Secure”… not a chance. Flash was a tyre fire and even Adobe would say so. They did their best with massive resources, and still couldn’t claim it was secure. Please please please don’t claim this project is secure. It isn’t.
- b112 5y ago
  Adobe may have had massive resources, but either they are incompetent, or didn't spend any time on flash. Multiple times, single devs working solo, wrote full flash interpreters over a few month. Adobe just doesn't know what they're doing. Look how they cratered cold fusion too. They also had a security / license daemon, lmgrd. What a joke, used MAC addresses for license issuance, was buggy, could be defeated with a simple ifconfig command.
  - speedybird 5y ago
    Adobe is competent in some regards, but seemingly not in others. Flash was riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities, so in this regard Adobe seems incompetent, or lazy at best. But the flip side to this coin is the reason flash became so popular; artists and designers saw in it a tool that scratched their itch well, not knowing or caring about the technical shortcomings. In this particular regard, making software that designers and artists like to use, Adobe seems to have a track record of competence.
    - grishka 5y ago
      Flash wasn't their own technology. They got it by acquiring Macromedia.
      - paavohtl 5y ago
        And Macromedia acquired it from FutureWave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#FutureWave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#FutureWave
  - hnzix 5y ago
ofrzeta 5y ago
I am still running an outdated version of the flash plugin shared library plugin that I downloaded and installed manually because I need it to handle some tasks for a specific client. Maybe one day I will have a monopoly and become really rich.
notananthem 5y ago
Flash isn't and wasn't secure and keeping any part of it alive is a huge liability.
- josefx 5y ago
  Still waiting for the day JavaScript isn't one of the top Pwn2Own contenders. The idea that there is any part of the web stack that isn't a Swiss cheese of security issues would be funny if reality wasn't so depressing.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
I read elsewhere in these comments that Adobe keeps Flash alive in China. If this is true and Adobe doesn't want China to take over Flash (Re: China & ARM), they won't open source it and they'll keep clones down/DMCA requests going to keep business with China. Just my 2¢.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Lack of open source licenses haven't stopped Chinese government or industries from stealing IP in the past.
aasasd 5y ago
Sounds exactly like those frivolous complaints that afaik are prohibited by DMCA.
- DoctorOW 5y ago
  How so? This is identical to piracy. Taking IP one doesn't own, stripping it of it's ability to make money (removing ads), and redistributing it without permission. Copyright infringement can get complex but this is one of the simple cases. Was the software under protection? Yes. Did the redistributor have permission? No.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    Did you read the article? P.S. If the CleanFlash installer contains the Flash Player distribution, instead of downloading and patching it on the user's machine, then the author indeed deserves to be slapped with a complaint for such an obvious blunder.
  - cdoctorow 5y ago
    This is simply untrue. The .NET file that Adobe served a DMCA512 notice on doesn't contain any of Adobe's copyrighted code. It's an unpacker and installer that users run on the software they download separately from Adobe's Chinese distributor. This is emphatically not a copyright violation of ANY kind, but it's especially not a violation of copyright that would entitle Adobe to use DMCA 512 to have it expeditiously removed. A DMCA 512 claim is explicitly - and solely - a mechanism for removing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. Again, this is a .NET file that has instructions for unpacking a standards-defined .ZIP archive and then installing its components. It's NOT a copy of Adobe's code. DMCA 512 has no place here. And while it's NOT a violation of DMCA 512 to host this batch file, it IS a violation of DMCA 512 to file a baseless takedown against it. The DMCA's requirement for a "good faith belief" that a file infringes copyright, "on pain of perjury," makes Adobe the sole lawbreaker in this story. == Separately: You might be wondering if this is a DMCA 1201 violation (that's the part of the DMCA that deals with "circumvention" of "a technological protection measure" that "controls access" to a copyrighted work. It's not. There's no TPM in a ZIP file, so there's no circumvention in unpacking it. But even if it was, Adobe didn't send a 1201 takedown (those don't really exist, because there's no 1201 safe harbor, though sometimes firms send 1201-related cease-and-desists), they sent a 512 takedown. Again, a 512 takedown only ever applies when there is distribution without authorization. There is no distribution. It's inarguable - and provable. The .NET code is (was) on github for anyone to inspect. It is unequivocally NOT a copy of Adobe Flash or any other work that originated with Adobe.
jdlyga 5y ago
When people say to not rely too much on proprietary software, this is why. "Oh, flash will be around forever! There's nothing to worry about". Same could be said about so many other things.
Aissen 5y ago
This is the company that blocked Ninite from having automated Flash installs, so… more of the same from Adobe ?
jeroenhd 5y ago
The most astounding thing in this article is that the developer is denying copyright infringement. There are many arguments to be made for preserving flash and providing a clean, easy way to install a modified version of Flash with the necessary security updates. But claiming that there was no copyright infringement? The Gitlab screenshot [0] uses Adobe's copyrighted logo, looks suspiciously like it's affiliated with Flash by mimicking its installer and installs an illegally distributed Flash binary. The real problem here is that the binary does contain propietary Flash code, but the code itself doesn't. I can't verify if the releases page hosted the full-fat executables or not; if they did, the DMCA seems quite standard. If they didn't, the DMCA was definitely filed under false pretenses because it claimed a violation of _Adobe's code_ rather than their resources. [0]: https://user-content.gitlab-static.net/7cd707fa280480fd2947dcb515e7ca4b8b7a622e/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f3536354c4a42492e706e67 https://user-content.gitlab-static.net/7cd707fa280480fd2947d...
- commoner 5y ago
  The use of the Flash logo may be a trademark violation, but it's not a copyright violation. The logo is so simple that Wikimedia Commons has it labeled "does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adobe_Flash_Player_32.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adobe_Flash_Player_3...
  - no_time 5y ago
    Now I'm curious about their stance on the McD's logo. Edit: same as the Flash logo. Didn't expect that...
heavyset_go 5y ago
One way the developer can work around this is to provide a program that doesn't distribute Flash at all, but allows the user to either modify the Flash installer or binary, or modify the system post-install, to achieve what the original project achieved.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Wouldn’t be too hard to extract the files out of the installer and install it yourself with a companion program and just hot link the installer. No clue why they didn’t just do that.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Having read about the situation more, the author of the code claims that they didn't distribute any copyrighted software that they don't have a right to distribute. Maybe they actually did what either of us suggested.
pkstn 5y ago
https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-flash/ https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-flash/
short12 5y ago
Good job adobe. Flash and everything related to it simply needs to die off
Shadonototra 5y ago
they should have open sourced everything.. adobe keep making bad decisions, no wonder they are slowly decaying
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Obviously the decay effects on finances aren’t seen for a while. However Adobe is currently around a top 25-30 company in the US by market cap. Their profits and revenue are enormous nowadays. The decay is glacial at best right now.
  - Shadonototra 5y ago
    decay starts from the reputation, then you'll see it with sales in the coming years you said it perfectly, they are a really big company, you don't die overnight
bitwize 5y ago
I thought they were going after Ruffle. I was all ready to be outraged and -- nope, if he's illegally redistributing the binary that's a legit action. If he distributed a patchkit, maybe that would technically be on the right side of copyright law (at least in the USA), but Adobe would still probably cry havoc and let slip the dogs of lawfare.
rmason 5y ago
What's even stranger is that there is an open source project under Apache for Flex. One that even has not only the blessing of Adobe but the support of the company. Their answer has been write an app in Flex and get in compiled to JS. No need for Flash! Several developers using it happily in the Lansing area. http://flex.apache.org/ http://flex.apache.org/
phendrenad2 5y ago
> alive, secure, and adware free But not open-source. Follow the rules, people.

303 points by CTOSian 5y ago

Oh good, they're not going after https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ -- that project is a much better idea than repackaging old Adobe binaries.

maverwa 5y ago
thats what I was thinking as well when I read the title. Good to hear its not about ruffle.
- Animats 5y ago
  Yes. Is there a non-Adobe authoring tool for Flash that's still around?
  - ZeikJT 5y ago
    Depends on your use case, some game dev tools still export to swf. Like Haxe: https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/compiler-targets.html https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/compiler-targets... https://haxe.org/manual/target-flash-getting-started.html https://haxe.org/manual/target-flash-getting-started.html
heavyset_go 5y ago
They're actually up-to-date Adobe binaries as the article says that Adobe's Chinese Flash subsidiary still maintains Flash and releases security updates for it each month. > The Chinese version of Flash receives one security update per month and can be freely downloaded from Flash.cn but also has significant strings attached. It comes preinstalled with an adware program called Flash Helper which, according to security sources, exhibits malicious behavior. Developed by ‘darktohka’ and previously located on Github, Clean Flash Installer solves these problems and more. > “Clean Flash Installer installs this up-to-date freely available version of Flash, but it comes WITHOUT the adware program,” darktohka informs TorrentFreak.
- Causality1 5y ago
  I will never understand the perversion of walling off security updates behind paywalls or geographic walls.
  - zeruch 5y ago
    ...depending on your legal department, it might be to ward off out of geo liabilities or expectations of support (whether actual or simply perceived).
    - chuckee 5y ago
      I've never heard of a company being held liable for releasing even a paid product with defective security, let alone a free one. They're not even held liable for deliberately including spyware [1]! That any lawyer would believe a company would be held liable for releasing an imperfect security patch is beyond absurd, and nothing more than a convenient excuse for abusive practices. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-smart-tv-snooping-extends-to-home-networks-second-blogger-says/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...
TravisHusky 5y ago
That looks like a sweet project. I'm happy to see web assembly being used in it too. I'll have to add it my long list of things I want to get around to tinkering with.
- db48x 5y ago
  https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

grishka 5y ago

One thing I can't understand is why Adobe is so insistent on keeping Flash really actually dead by saying it's "unsupported" yet still keeping the sources to themselves. If they aren't gaining anything from it anyway, why can't they just open-source it? I mean they won't lose anything either by doing that, right? The community would fix all the bugs eventually. Probably quicker and better than Adobe, too.

kvark 5y ago
Doesn't give them anything. Even adds some risks that people sue them for copyright infringement. E.g. from using GPL projects.
- grishka 5y ago
  > E.g. from using GPL projects. Interesting — I just checked the standalone flash player I still have (and use sometimes), the "about" window doesn't list any free software. So either they aren't using any, or... But I find it unlikely that a company with this many lawyers would not read every letter of the license of every library they include in any of their projects.
  - georgemcbay 5y ago
    I've worked with the Flash Player source code in the far off past (I worked for a company called Chumby which licensed Adobe's Flash Player to power apps running in a device similar to the modern Amazon Dash Look) and while you would see things in that codebase that make your head spin, improper use of GPL libraries was not one of them.
cylon13 5y ago
As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. I don't think it's necessarily true to say they have nothing to lose by open-sourcing it though. Who knows how many private shared libraries are in there that are still required by other still-active Adobe software. And they're also probably not excited to give up rights to a massive pile of code which they could conceivably want to use in future projects. In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)

jimbob45 5y ago

Is it not still possible to run an outdated browser version with Flash installed in a container? Don't get me wrong, that's a hassle but at least it's not lights out for Flash for these people.

johnebgd 5y ago
Why stop there? You could virtualize an outdated operating system with an outdated browser.
- cardosof 5y ago
  You can buy old hardware and have the whole vintage web experience!
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    With great difficulty now, due to pervasive HTTPS
    - remexre 5y ago
      I'm now imagining an old beige-box desktop with a Raspberry Pi acting as a de-HTTPS proxy... with more compute power than the desktop
      - EamonnMR 5y ago
        People definitely do this
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Ooh, I don't think I've ever visited a Flash site with HTTPS.

quotz 5y ago

On another note, Adobe keeps downloading bloatware on my laptop anytime I open creative cloud. Such a disappointment they’ve become

particulars02 5y ago

Why do we want to keep Flash alive?

rzzzt 5y ago
So that Ferry Halim's Orisinal page does not have to show this message instead of presenting you with wonderful games: https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
jjj123 5y ago
There’s a lot of original content (animations and games mostly) that only lives in .swf format. It would be nice to keep flash around if just for archival purposes.
eric__cartman 5y ago
Maybe you want to play/watch the thousands of Flash games/animations that exist? Use legacy software that depends on Flash? I agree that it's an insecure piece of crap that shouldn't be used in any modern system, but that doesn't mean that everyone should be restricted from trying to use old software that depends on it, as long as they asume the security risks of doing so.
klyrs 5y ago
Strong Bad. Probably Badger Badger Badger and some games, but mostly Strong Bad.
- iKnowKungFoo 5y ago
  Strong Bad lives on YouTube now. https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom/featured https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom/featured
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    There's no interactive elements on YouTube though. I'm sure 99% of viewers don't really care, but it's not entirely the same.

seanieb 5y ago

“Secure”… not a chance. Flash was a tyre fire and even Adobe would say so. They did their best with massive resources, and still couldn’t claim it was secure. Please please please don’t claim this project is secure. It isn’t.

b112 5y ago
Adobe may have had massive resources, but either they are incompetent, or didn't spend any time on flash. Multiple times, single devs working solo, wrote full flash interpreters over a few month. Adobe just doesn't know what they're doing. Look how they cratered cold fusion too. They also had a security / license daemon, lmgrd. What a joke, used MAC addresses for license issuance, was buggy, could be defeated with a simple ifconfig command.
- speedybird 5y ago
  Adobe is competent in some regards, but seemingly not in others. Flash was riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities, so in this regard Adobe seems incompetent, or lazy at best. But the flip side to this coin is the reason flash became so popular; artists and designers saw in it a tool that scratched their itch well, not knowing or caring about the technical shortcomings. In this particular regard, making software that designers and artists like to use, Adobe seems to have a track record of competence.
  - grishka 5y ago
    Flash wasn't their own technology. They got it by acquiring Macromedia.
    - paavohtl 5y ago
      And Macromedia acquired it from FutureWave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#FutureWave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#FutureWave
- hnzix 5y ago

ofrzeta 5y ago

I am still running an outdated version of the flash plugin shared library plugin that I downloaded and installed manually because I need it to handle some tasks for a specific client. Maybe one day I will have a monopoly and become really rich.

notananthem 5y ago

Flash isn't and wasn't secure and keeping any part of it alive is a huge liability.

josefx 5y ago
Still waiting for the day JavaScript isn't one of the top Pwn2Own contenders. The idea that there is any part of the web stack that isn't a Swiss cheese of security issues would be funny if reality wasn't so depressing.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

I read elsewhere in these comments that Adobe keeps Flash alive in China. If this is true and Adobe doesn't want China to take over Flash (Re: China & ARM), they won't open source it and they'll keep clones down/DMCA requests going to keep business with China. Just my 2¢.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Lack of open source licenses haven't stopped Chinese government or industries from stealing IP in the past.

aasasd 5y ago

Sounds exactly like those frivolous complaints that afaik are prohibited by DMCA.

DoctorOW 5y ago
How so? This is identical to piracy. Taking IP one doesn't own, stripping it of it's ability to make money (removing ads), and redistributing it without permission. Copyright infringement can get complex but this is one of the simple cases. Was the software under protection? Yes. Did the redistributor have permission? No.
- aasasd 5y ago
  Did you read the article? P.S. If the CleanFlash installer contains the Flash Player distribution, instead of downloading and patching it on the user's machine, then the author indeed deserves to be slapped with a complaint for such an obvious blunder.
- cdoctorow 5y ago
  This is simply untrue. The .NET file that Adobe served a DMCA512 notice on doesn't contain any of Adobe's copyrighted code. It's an unpacker and installer that users run on the software they download separately from Adobe's Chinese distributor. This is emphatically not a copyright violation of ANY kind, but it's especially not a violation of copyright that would entitle Adobe to use DMCA 512 to have it expeditiously removed. A DMCA 512 claim is explicitly - and solely - a mechanism for removing unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work. Again, this is a .NET file that has instructions for unpacking a standards-defined .ZIP archive and then installing its components. It's NOT a copy of Adobe's code. DMCA 512 has no place here. And while it's NOT a violation of DMCA 512 to host this batch file, it IS a violation of DMCA 512 to file a baseless takedown against it. The DMCA's requirement for a "good faith belief" that a file infringes copyright, "on pain of perjury," makes Adobe the sole lawbreaker in this story. == Separately: You might be wondering if this is a DMCA 1201 violation (that's the part of the DMCA that deals with "circumvention" of "a technological protection measure" that "controls access" to a copyrighted work. It's not. There's no TPM in a ZIP file, so there's no circumvention in unpacking it. But even if it was, Adobe didn't send a 1201 takedown (those don't really exist, because there's no 1201 safe harbor, though sometimes firms send 1201-related cease-and-desists), they sent a 512 takedown. Again, a 512 takedown only ever applies when there is distribution without authorization. There is no distribution. It's inarguable - and provable. The .NET code is (was) on github for anyone to inspect. It is unequivocally NOT a copy of Adobe Flash or any other work that originated with Adobe.

jdlyga 5y ago

When people say to not rely too much on proprietary software, this is why. "Oh, flash will be around forever! There's nothing to worry about". Same could be said about so many other things.

Aissen 5y ago

This is the company that blocked Ninite from having automated Flash installs, so… more of the same from Adobe ?

jeroenhd 5y ago

The most astounding thing in this article is that the developer is denying copyright infringement. There are many arguments to be made for preserving flash and providing a clean, easy way to install a modified version of Flash with the necessary security updates. But claiming that there was no copyright infringement? The Gitlab screenshot [0] uses Adobe's copyrighted logo, looks suspiciously like it's affiliated with Flash by mimicking its installer and installs an illegally distributed Flash binary. The real problem here is that the binary does contain propietary Flash code, but the code itself doesn't. I can't verify if the releases page hosted the full-fat executables or not; if they did, the DMCA seems quite standard. If they didn't, the DMCA was definitely filed under false pretenses because it claimed a violation of _Adobe's code_ rather than their resources. [0]: https://user-content.gitlab-static.net/7cd707fa280480fd2947dcb515e7ca4b8b7a622e/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f3536354c4a42492e706e67 https://user-content.gitlab-static.net/7cd707fa280480fd2947d...

commoner 5y ago
The use of the Flash logo may be a trademark violation, but it's not a copyright violation. The logo is so simple that Wikimedia Commons has it labeled "does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adobe_Flash_Player_32.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adobe_Flash_Player_3...
- no_time 5y ago
  Now I'm curious about their stance on the McD's logo. Edit: same as the Flash logo. Didn't expect that...

heavyset_go 5y ago

One way the developer can work around this is to provide a program that doesn't distribute Flash at all, but allows the user to either modify the Flash installer or binary, or modify the system post-install, to achieve what the original project achieved.

flatiron 5y ago
Wouldn’t be too hard to extract the files out of the installer and install it yourself with a companion program and just hot link the installer. No clue why they didn’t just do that.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Having read about the situation more, the author of the code claims that they didn't distribute any copyrighted software that they don't have a right to distribute. Maybe they actually did what either of us suggested.

pkstn 5y ago

https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-flash/ https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-flash/

short12 5y ago

Good job adobe. Flash and everything related to it simply needs to die off

Shadonototra 5y ago

they should have open sourced everything.. adobe keep making bad decisions, no wonder they are slowly decaying

skinnymuch 5y ago
Obviously the decay effects on finances aren’t seen for a while. However Adobe is currently around a top 25-30 company in the US by market cap. Their profits and revenue are enormous nowadays. The decay is glacial at best right now.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  decay starts from the reputation, then you'll see it with sales in the coming years you said it perfectly, they are a really big company, you don't die overnight

bitwize 5y ago

I thought they were going after Ruffle. I was all ready to be outraged and -- nope, if he's illegally redistributing the binary that's a legit action. If he distributed a patchkit, maybe that would technically be on the right side of copyright law (at least in the USA), but Adobe would still probably cry havoc and let slip the dogs of lawfare.

rmason 5y ago

What's even stranger is that there is an open source project under Apache for Flex. One that even has not only the blessing of Adobe but the support of the company. Their answer has been write an app in Flex and get in compiled to JS. No need for Flash! Several developers using it happily in the Lansing area. http://flex.apache.org/ http://flex.apache.org/

phendrenad2 5y ago

> alive, secure, and adware free But not open-source. Follow the rules, people.