Facebook Security Chief Alex Stamos Calls On Adobe To Kill Flash
Has the time come to put Adobe's Flash Player plugin out of our misery? Facebook CSO Alex Stamos thinks so. In a series of Twitter posts, Stamos makes a plea for Adobe to set a date to euthanize Flash, allowing the web and Internet users at large to move on to better (and more secure) technologies. The question is, will Adobe do it?
Probably not at the sole behest of Stamos, though he isn't the only one calling for an end to Flash. An anonymous group calling it Occupy Flash has been pushing for the same thing for the past few years. The Occupy Flash website has been tweeted out thousands of times, has over 5,100 recommendations from Google+ users, and over 20,000 'Likes' on Facebook.
For Adobe to discontinue Flash on the desktop like it did for mobile, the public outcry probably needs to get louder, and come from figures like Stamos who work for prominent organizations.
"It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day," Stamos said. "Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once."
There seems to be a growing intolerance for Flash and the frequency at which zero-day vulnerabilities are discovered. To wit, three critical security holes recently came to light, prompting Mozilla to temporarily disable Flash by default on its Firefox browser.
The web has yet to fully put Flash in its rear view mirror, though with each new vulnerability that's discovered, it seems like Flash's end-of-life is just a matter of when, not if.
Probably not at the sole behest of Stamos, though he isn't the only one calling for an end to Flash. An anonymous group calling it Occupy Flash has been pushing for the same thing for the past few years. The Occupy Flash website has been tweeted out thousands of times, has over 5,100 recommendations from Google+ users, and over 20,000 'Likes' on Facebook.
For Adobe to discontinue Flash on the desktop like it did for mobile, the public outcry probably needs to get louder, and come from figures like Stamos who work for prominent organizations.
"It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day," Stamos said. "Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once."
There seems to be a growing intolerance for Flash and the frequency at which zero-day vulnerabilities are discovered. To wit, three critical security holes recently came to light, prompting Mozilla to temporarily disable Flash by default on its Firefox browser.
The web has yet to fully put Flash in its rear view mirror, though with each new vulnerability that's discovered, it seems like Flash's end-of-life is just a matter of when, not if.
