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Flash 10.1

elgarak

Illuminator
elgarak
Joined
Nov 7, 2003
Messages
4,472
Has anybody updated to Flash 10.1 recently?

It seems that Adobe in their infinite wisdom have moved the preferences pane of my own locally running flash plug-in to a flash script running on their webpage. Which include the settings for turning on and off permissions for activating my webcam, microphone etc.

I can't say that feels okay. Kinda creepy, actually. Appears to be made of fail.

Comments?
 
Kopji said:
most people i know really serious about privacy put a piece of tape over their webcam when they are not using it.

Sorry, I don't really know a lot about the flash internals, but as long as i can remember the control panel has been online. Yes this IS one of the weirder apps I know, but this has been this way a long time.

Flash settings control panel:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html#118539
Click to expand...
Really??

I seem to recall that up until recently right-clicking on a flash element one could select a control panel, which popped up on top of the original flash element, and did not go to an Adobe or Macromedia page. To me, the latter seemed to be new. Although I must admit that it's been a while since I last did this, but not more than a year. I never experienced any indication that any of those settings were anything other than local, saved on my computer up until my latest update. I just discovered it since there were some news stories regarding the security of webcam access with flash, which triggered my exploring.

Personally, I'm not too worried about that, as I know that the status LED on my MacBook is hardwired into the camera and will turn on if the camera is accessed, remotely or otherwise.
 
Yes, the right-click panel for webcam, local storage etc is still there. The online one is in addition to that, and includes more options as well as the basic ones.

The online one is for a bit more advanced stuff that has to do with permissions and domains, and essentially disables or weakens a portion of Flash's sandbox nature. Adobe rightly makes it hard and scary to change these settings, as the sandboxed nature of Flash is one of the strongest selling points of the technology.

Interestingly, I've recently had to set these permissons myself, because I am developing a Flash app that requires making HTTP requests. When testing the resulting movie locally, I got that screen and had to set permissions. It's because I'm testing it from my own machine and the code looks like it's phoning something on the internet, which is a potential security risk.

Once the app is complete and everything is uploaded to a server online, neither me or my users will have to use those settings since everything then is hosted online and doesn't cross the local / global line.

ETA: The settings are there, and I imagine some things are only possible by using them. No sane developer of casual online Flash content would bank on being able to convince her users to do this, though. For applications that need to be both local and use online content, it makes more sense to just package it as a local app (which you can with AIR).
 
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