Flash Player now End Of Life

[OscarTalks]

The Flash Player browser plug-in from Adobe reached End Of Life on December 31st 2020
They are recommending that everyone uninstalls it.
The page that was the download link now takes you to the information page.
By the way, loading this page seems very heavy, especially problematic on older systems.
Anyway, quote:-
Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after 31 December 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning 12 January 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.
So I have now removed all Flash Player .pet packages from my Puppy storage repo at
http://smokey01.com/OscarTalks

[s243a]

Have you scene the following thread?

Flashpoint - An app to access & play Flash-based game archives after Flash goes EOL...

there are also open source alternatives to the flash player. So perhaps flash might still have some use beyond end of life.

The open source alternatives are Lightspark & GNU Gnash. I once tried to build Lightspark:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 03b0f5d677

I might try it again someday. The swift programming language is interesting and there have been some pretty cool applications built in the past that used flash.

Here are some more alternatives:

Ruffle, a Flash emulator, and CheerpX, an x86 virtualization technology, both leverage WebAssembly to play .swf files in the browser.
...
On the other hand, Ruffle is an open-source Flash player emulator. that can be used as a replacement for Adobe Flash Player in the browser or on a desktop. Ruffle is written with Rust and leverages WebAssembly.
...
CheerpX, from Learningtech, the company behind the Java-to-web compiler CheerpJ, strives to run Flash content in the browser by virtualizing the Flash player. CheerpX may also extend the life of legacy Flex/Spark (enterprise) UIs. CheerpX is an x86 to WebAssembly virtualization technology that claims to run any x86 application fully client side.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/weba ... ol-legacy/

[mikewalsh]

Personally, I can see no reason why Flash cannot continue to be used, say, within a 'sandbox' of some kind.

This is essentially what Flashpoint does; moreover, it even goes so far as to connect with BlueMaxima's own servers via a proxy, so as to make absolutely certain there's no Internet-facing exposure of any kind whatsoever.

The same goes for playing your own Flash-based SWF game files on the desktop; of course, in this respect, Puppy is a lot safer than other distros, because if you DO suspect you've picked up summat 'nasty' during a session, we can simply 'nuke it' rather than save it.

If you do play Flash games on the desktop, just make sure you're using any version of the 'standalone' FlashPlayer prior to 32.0.0.3xxx. All releases later than these have the by now well-known 'kill switch' built-in. The 'libflashplayer' & 'libpepflashplayer' items are the browser plug-ins, and these should be avoided like the plague.

Mike.