Items tagged with Flash
Early in September, Microsoft announced the looming end of support for Adobe Flash Player in the Edge browser as we close out 2020 into 2021. We are now creeping toward the end of 2020, and Flash is finally beginning to get the boot. Microsoft has released an update to remove Adobe Flash from Windows and prevent future reinstalls. Adobe Flash and Flash Player were once the rulers of the roost online. Content, games, ads, and more were all driven by Flash. It became incredibly popular and subsequently was targeted by malicious people. This made Flash a dangerous point of attack for millions of devices. As we wrote last month, “Couple that with poor performance on some machines, Adobe’s...
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It's been nine months since AMD unleashed its Zen 2 processors and, more importantly as it related to this article, the X570 chipset with its PCI Express 4 connectivity, into the world. In the time since then, there hasn't been a torrent of extra-fast flash released by all that many storage vendors; even at launch, we only had Gigabyte's Aorus PCIe 4 SSD on hand to test. Considering that Gigabyte's drive could far outstrip the bandwidth available in PCI Express 3.0 x4 drives, while putting up some solid IOPs figures, it seems that those who feel a need for speed would want these drives, assuming they had a motherboard with a processor and chipset capable of pushing it to the limit. That seeming...
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Adobe Flash has long been a method that developers used to put interactive content on the internet. There are tens of thousands of games out there that use Flash that will no longer work when December 31st, 2020 comes around. At the end of 2020, Flash will die off as most major web browsers remove Flash support. Ahead of all the games that rely on Flash dying off, a project is underway called Flashpoint that aims to save them. Flashpoint is a project that has so far saved over 36,000 Flash games from the digital garbage can. Flashpoint uses open-source software to allow users to download and play a long list of games and animations. Fans of flash games who want their favorite game to be saved...
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At one point in time, it seemed like Adobe's Flash animation plugin was invincible. How could such a widely-used API ever die off? Well, as it turns out, when the plugin in question has been riddled with security vulnerabilities for most of its life, sometimes the developer will do the world a favor and put the solution out to pasture. In 2017, Adobe announced that it was doing just that. Flash was effectively dead, or at least will be by the end of 2020. Shortly after that announcement, Google announced that Chrome would cease support for the plugin at the same time, and inevitably, we knew every other browser maker would follow suit. Microsoft also jumped in vowing to kill support in 2020 for...
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Are you guys ready to get rid of Flash? We here at HotHardware definitely are, and thankfully, Adobe has already seen the writing on the wall. Adobe gave us our first glimpse at the impending death of Flash back in late 2015 — we just didn’t think that it would take five years for the blood to finally drain from the plugin’ increasingly lifeless body. Adobe today confirmed that it will no longer distribute or update Flash by the close of the year 2020. Hopefully, the “true” demise of Flash will happen quickly after that point since there will be no security updates to protect users from the scores of exploits that plague the software. With no support from Adobe, customers and developers would...
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Western Digital today announced that it has successfully developed four bit-per-cell (also known as X4) 3D NAND built using 64-layer, BiCS3 technology. The company says that these chips can store 768 gigabits on a single chip (equivalent to 96GB), which is a 50% increase from 512 gigabit three bit-per-cell NAND (as basic math verifies). WD's X4 3D NAND was designed with the help of the company's work with X4 2D NAND, and one thing in particular the company is really proud of is the fact that its QLC flash delivers performance similar to that of X3 three bit-per-cell NAND. What that means is that consumers shouldn't fret too much over performance, but instead focus on the extra storage they're...
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There might not be a storage medium that's definitively indestructible, or perfectly reliable, but solid-state storage would rank near the top. A hard drive, for example, might be able to house a large amount of data, but if it's dropped to the ground, or its host PC is bumped hard enough, all of that data could effectively be ruined in the blink of an eye. Solid-state storage is a bit different. If it's jostled during operation, it won't be affected, and the same goes for experiencing a fall to the ground. But, despite its durability, it's still not indestructible or entirely reliable, and new research from Carnegie Mellon University, Seagate, and ETH Zürich highlights some new reason why. It's...
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Say it with me, “Let Flash Die”. As we’ve reported on numerous times on HotHardware, Adobe Flash is a plugin that has proven itself to not only be a resource hog, but a wretched security risk on nearly every computing platform that it invades. Even Adobe has seen the writing on the wall, as it is deprecating support for the much-hated plugin. However, one particular company isn’t quite ready to let go of Flash just yet, and it is willing to reward customers that embrace the plugin with a $5 discount. FedEx gives its customers the ability to “Conveniently design, print & ship documents anytime, from presentations to flyers to posters” using its FedEx Office online creation tools. However,...
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For over 13 years, Microsoft has been issuing monthly security updates for Windows on what is known as Patch Tuesday, typically the second Tuesday of every month. This month's update would have fell on Valentine's Day, except that Microsoft did something highly unusual—it delayed the Patch Tuesday rollout following the discovery of a "last minute issue that could impact some customers." Now a week later, Microsoft has issued an emergency patch for a flaw in Adobe Flash Player. The out-of-band release pertains to a critical vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that could allow an attacker to execute malicious code remotely. It affects Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows...
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At this point, Adobe Flash is pretty much the scourge of the internet. The long-standing browser plugin has a penchant for draining PC batteries, impeding overall performance and presents an oft-abused security nightmare. Adobe has already announced that it is sunsetting the plugin in favor or HTML5 and most browser makers have announced their intentions to end support. Microsoft is the latest to step up its efforts to rid the world of Flash, and announced today that Flash will be disabled by default in Edge with the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update. Microsoft hopes that this move will encourage sites to quickly adopt HTML5 content instead. “Sites that support HTML5 will default to a clean...
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Although NVMe PCI Express solid state drives are all the rage as of late, due to their relatively strong performance and inherent feature benefits, manufacturers continue to tune and refine their SATA based offerings as well. Case in point: the brand new OCZ VX500 series solid state drives we’ll be showing you here today. The OCZ VX500 series targets the mainstream computing segment and initially consists of a quartet of 2.5mm SATA SSDs, packing all, in-house, Toshiba made technology. The hook is, even though these new drives are priced aggressively, they eschew less expensive TLC NAND in favor of more durable MLC, and performance is relatively strong too.We’ve got the full list of features and...
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Flash's days on the web are numbered. That's been evident for the past couple of years as the anti-Flash movement has gained steam. Little by little, software developers and online services have been removing Flash support from their products, and starting in August, you can count Firefox among them. Well, partially anyway. Firefox isn't getting rid of Flash altogether, but the browser will begin blocking certain Flash content that Mozilla feels is not essential to the user experience. The decision to crack down on Flash plugins is one of several things Mozilla has planned to ultimately bring Firefox users improved security, better battery life, faster page loads, and better browser responsiveness....
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Adobe recently published a security advisory APSA16-03, which details a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player version 21.0.0.242 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Chrome OS. This comes after a patch for a zero day exploit was released in early April. Adobe believes the attackers are a group called “ScarCruft”. ScarCruft is a relatively recently APT group that has launched attacks in countries such as Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait, and Romania. The group recently has taken advantage of two Adobe Flash and one Microsoft Internet Explorer exploits. ScarCruft currently has two operations called Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus. Operation Daybreak...
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It’s safe to say that Adobe Flash is one of the most disliked pieces of software in the modern computing era. What started off as an innovative way for users to experience interactive content and simple online games has transformed into a resource hog and significant security risk. Software vendors have taken extreme measures to scale back support for the plugin and Adobe itself has announced that Flash will soon be on the chopping block. This week, we’re learning that Google is taking further steps to ensure Flash’s demise. Starting in the fourth quarter, Google Chrome will default to HTML5 instead of Flash. What this means is that if a website provides a choice of displaying either HTML5 or...
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It’s been a rough week for Adobe and its Flash plugin. This week, Microsoft announced that it is hitting the pause button on unnecessary and excessive Flash content on webpages, and now we’re learning that Adobe had to scramble to patch up yet another zero-day exploit in Flash. This latest exploit is especially nasty as it uses a security hole found within Flash to allow nefarious parties to infiltrate Windows 10 machines and install ransomware. As we’ve seen by recent ransomware outbreaks at hospitals around the country, this is serious business. The exploit was initially discovered by Trend Micro researchers on March 31st, while fellow security researchers Proofpoint, Sophos and FireEye have...
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After major web browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox decided to push Flash further into irrelevancy, Adobe finally saw the writing on the wall and announced that Flash would be put out to pasture. The internet rejoiced at the news, but it will still be quite a while before we are completely rid of the resource hogging and battery draining scourge that has haunted us for years. To that end, Microsoft is trying to at least make the transition a bit easier to bear with the announcement that Windows 10’s Edge browser will gain the ability to “intelligently auto-pause” Flash content that is not pivotal to the viewing experience of a website. This is basically the same functionality that...
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Solid State Storage continues to come down in cost and scale higher in speed and density. Though spinning hard disk media will likely have a place at least in the data center perhaps for generations to come, SSDs are making great strides, driving toward cost parity with HDDs with each new generation of product, while offering orders of magnitude performance gains and even higher reliability in many applications. One of the biggest names in Flash storage is Samsung, from their consumer grade SSD 950 Pro and 850 EVO lines to the squarely enterprise-targeted product the company has announced for volume availability today. Laying to rest the short-lived claim Fixstar made on "the world's largest...
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Little by little, the web is transitioning to a Flash-free experience. HTML5 has emerged as the popular replacement for Flash content, though there are still scores of web ads out there that still use Adobe's Flash Player. That's about to change—at the end of June, Google will no longer accept new Flash-based ads on its ad networks."Starting June 30, 2016, display ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded in into AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketeing," Google's AdWords division stated in a Google+ post. "Starting January 2nd, 2017, display ads in the Flash format can no longer run on the Google Display Network or through DoubleClick."The anti-Flash sentiment has grown strong in recent...
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2015 has proven to be a massive year for Adobe's Flash plugin, but for all the wrong reasons. Flash is already infamous for being one of the most vulnerable pieces of software on the planet, but in 2015, 316 bugs were found and squashed. That comes out to about 6 bugs per week for a piece of software that's used by the vast majority of notebook and desktop users. What's most impressive about the sheer number of bugs Flash has is the fact that ultimately, we're dealing with a mere plugin here, not a massive software package. While Flash was once considered "cool", a de facto choice for Web animation, the past decade hasn't been too kind to it. The negative reputation was earned thanks mostly to...
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As if Adobe's Flash Player needed another nail in its coffin, it nevertheless received yet another one this weekend from Facebook. The world's largest social playground announced that it recently flipped the switch over to HTML5 to be the default video player for videos on its website, and that includes the ones that appear in its News Feed. "From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs," Facebook stated in a blog post. You could see this coming from a country mile, though it didn't happen overnight. Facebook had to address several...
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We’ve been saying it for years: Adobe needs to go ahead and kill Flash. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs called for Flash’s demise five years ago and at the time, it seemed like an impossibility. But after a half decade of increasing security exploits and performance degradation in even the most powerful PCs, the Internet has quite effectively turned its back on Flash. Companies like Amazon, Google and Firefox have all given Flash the cold shoulder in recent months and the lapses in security show no signs of slowing down. Adobe has finally gotten the hint and is retiring the Flash brand. “Flash has played a leading role in bringing new capabilities to the web,” said Adobe in a corporate blog posting....
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At this point, we are no longer surprised that Adobe Flash is being used as an easy vector to exploit computers and entire network. Back in the day, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs trashed Adobe Flash, calling it buggy, full of security holes and detrimental to the battery life of mobile devices. Five years later, Flash is still with us and it is still wreaking havoc on all three of those fronts. The latest Flash vulnerability was revealed this week, and it affects ALL version of the software — yes, even version 19.0.0.207, which was released on Tuesday. The exploit, which is labeled CVE-2015-7645, was masterminded by a group known as Pawn Storm. For now, the exploit hasn’t been directed at the...
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