As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China | Hacker News Reader

As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China

hk.appledaily.com

56 pointsshrikant6 comments

> Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.

> Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

that part really made it "chef's kiss worthy".

What the hell is a pirated version of flash? Isn’t flash free? Can you even pirate a free software?

The company had to install an older version of Flash that didn't include the 2021 "time bomb". Adobe no longer hosts the Flash installers on their website, so the company had to download a copy of Flash from some random website.

I'm surprised the time bomb affected them. Adobe publishes a separate build of Flash for China, which doesn't have the time bomb and will continue to be supported until at least 2023.

And even if they are using the non-China version of Flash, they didn't need to install a "pirated" version. The Flash time bomb can be disabled for individual websites using Flash's enterprise management features. This is documented on Adobe's website.

They would still need to find a browser that will load the plugin. Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari no longer even load the plugin. The Firefox ESR branch (Extended Support Release intended for enterprises) is based on Firefox 78 and still loads the Flash plugin. Firefox 78 ESR will continue to receive security patches (for Firefox, not Flash!) until 2021 Q3.

More than that, the IM conversation in the screenshot mentions downloading Flash 29, a version you can still download from adobe.com (granted, finding the link is a fun bit of searching).

Odd story.

Previously when we install an operating system, and a software on a computer, it will just work forever. NASA has explorers running after many years, and software industry we have to keep upgrading and fix issues, and write new code to do exactly the same thing as before. With subscriptions, I guess you probably need to upgrade hardwares as well as softwares because the new code will automatically kill your old hardwares.

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