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Freaky Flash 6 Fishy Features
donpardo writes "I upgraded to Flash 6 last week (to patch a security hole). When I right clicked on a Flash ad at abcnews.com, and pulled down to Settings I got a tabbed dialogue box asking if I wanted to give them access to my cam and microphone. Clicking through on the tabs revealed that the microphone and the camera had already been detected and that the microphone was active. I doubt the camera or the microphone were sending information out but this still seems invasive. Here are Macromedia's statements about the mic and the camera. In addition there is a setting to ask how much information the site can store on your computer. The default value is 100K. According to the information statement "Data can be anything from your user name to your current score in an interactive game to a list of stocks in your portfolio ... The data is not public, but the privacy of this data depends on the policies of the web site where the movie is hosted."" I thought the first sentence of this submission was telling ...
The first tab is set to 'deny' access to both your mic and your cam by default. The fact that the mic is turned on or off has to do with your PC's settings, not flash players.
Still, could be fun...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
They are turned off by default, and everytime a new domain tries to access them, the user is prompted to give permission.
mike chambers
mesh@macromedia.com
No, these features are new to the Flash 6 plugin.
They got a custom video codec built by Sorenson built to do this. That's what Apple is suing Sorenson over.
The thing is that it's a full video code and weighs in around 75k. Pretty impressive really. Audio is MP3 encoded.
A|Q|U|A
It does vector and is even a bit more open....
OK, some people seem to have found info about what the camera and mic objects are for on the web but I'll post the link again for the people who skipped that posting before moving on: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/2002/04/30.html#a 24
1. The default the the camera and mic is to DISALLOW a site to access them.
2. The camera and mic objects are there for something MM has coming down the tubes for a communication server via the Flash player, and the player will PROMPT users before ever granting a site access to their mics and cameras...I've got the beta of the server for testing purposes and it asks me every time (since I never check the little box asking me if I want the player to remember my setting)
3. As many people have pointed out, the Local Storage settings are essentially cookies for Flash. They work in pretty much the same fashion (can only be accessed by the domain that created them, etc.) as cookies, but are only consumable by Flash.
Personally, I wish some of the folks here would give the "Flash is evil" stuff a rest and see more people looking at the GOOD things that can be done with Flash rather than just the worthless drivel that a lot of people have produced, but that's the opinion of someone who works for MM, so I don't have much of a prayer there.