Thread: Mozilla Firefox kills Flash

Mozilla Firefox kills Flash by default, security chief calls for Adobe to issue an end-of-life date

It’s not been a great week for Adobe. In the wake of the Hacking Team hacks that shared 400GB of data belonging to the secretive company, multiple 0-day exploits surrounding Flash and Java have been shared with the online community. Adobe has reacted quickly and patched the first wave of flaws, but a second set of problems was discovered yesterday, including another pair of 0-days. This has the tech community generally saying that enough is enough, with Firefox’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, blacklisting Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.203 and calling for a firm “end of life” date from Adobe.

Flash has already been on life support — we covered recently how Google is going to start “intelligently blocking” auto-playing flash videos, possibly in a bid to boost its own prominence, but it underscores the fundamental vulnerabilities in some of the software that still powers much of the ‘Net. Currently, Internet Explorer 11 still uses the Adobe Flash player by default on YouTube, while Chrome and Firefox have both moved to HTML5. Other services and ads still rely on Flash, though the number has been declining.

The 0-day attacks discovered to date have been severe; at least one attack against Chrome was potent enough to breach the sandbox Google builds around the browser. The attacks in question have also been making their way into the real world; exploits based on them began showing up in the wild just days after the news initially leaked. Full details on that attack were published in security research firm Cyberreason’s blog last week.

Hacking Team’s exploits worked in part by cloaking malware operations in neutral language. The command and control servers were given names that looked as if they corresponded to newsfeed services and ad servers, while targets were euphemistically referred to as “customers.”

The underlying threats to services like Flash and Java make it a smart move to deactivate both products unless you have a specific and particular need to use them, and then to sandbox that usage in a single browser via a whitelist approach. Flash and Java have both been widely used in the business world to create website frontends or application frameworks, so you may not be able to get away from them altogether. We definitely recommend using both services as little as possible.

Adobe has yet to respond to the calls for it to set a firm Flash phase-out date, but it’s time for the technology to get gone. This may cause some short-term problems with websites that trade primarily in flash titles, and there may need to be a long-term support option for businesses that rely on flash for work purposes, but it’s time to move to better, more secure solutions.

http://mobile.extremetech.com/intern...oogle.co.th%2F

Firefox was blocking flash the last couple days for me, and today allowed a new update. No problems now.

^ I've had trouble with xhamster also

Originally Posted by Dillinger

^ I've had trouble with xhamster also

Fookin gumbyment is blocking that.

Youtube vids posted here didn't work either.

I've been having trouble for a week. Think I got it upgraded last night. Working for now...................

I met Adobe's security team at a conference once, they spent most of it trying to hide.

My Firefox currently has a huge memory leak. Used to run at 300,000 - 400,000 of memory but, now, it it consistently climbs to 1,500,000 and then blacks out and have to restart it in the task manager.

Try a firefox reset. Worked for me.

tried numerous re sets and it always comes back to the high memory load.

Try some of these fixes

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...uch-memory-ram

Originally Posted by spliff

tried numerous re sets and it always comes back to the high memory load.

If the reset of ff doesn't work then I don't know what to suggest. I stopped looking when it worked for me.
I must have stumbled on the soution by accident.

Frankly I think I have to find a new browser...anyone heard of Spark?

Originally Posted by spliff

Frankly I think I have to find a new browser...anyone heard of Spark?

It's linked with Baidu..... so I would give it a wide berth or you could end up with all sorts of crap in your PC

That explains the trouble viewing xhamster and youtube recently. At least i don't have to punch the laptop anymore.

Originally Posted by spliff

anyone heard of Spark?

Just another resource hogging version of chrome.

Pale Moon.

Fuck baidu...hate it.