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Next Flash Version Will Support Private Browsing
An anonymous reader writes "The world rolled its eyes when the problem of Flash cookies came to light several months ago. Even if you're careful about cookies or even if you use your browser's private surfing feature, sites can still track you through cookies stored by Flash. However, soon enough the next version of Flash, 10.1, will support private browsing and will integrate with browsers to turn it on when the browser itself is in private browsing mode. Browsers still store data during a private browser session, but they will delete it all at the end of the session. The same will be true of Flash private browsing."
Now I can plan that birthday party without anyone knowing.
Sorry Adobe, but it's time for HTML5.
Because Advertisers are the customers that matter, and they love having something that survives a naive "clear cookies" attempt by the pitiful consumer?
Get FlashBlock or NoScript to turn off flash altogether.
Get BetterPrivacy to automatically delete Flash cookies on exit; it seems to work well.
This feature is here now for Firefox users with the Better Privacy extension.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Online games are a major user (as opposed to abuser) of storing data with Flash. There are some that actually are complex and long enough (and fun, too!) to warrant a save function. It can also be mildly-to-moderately helpful for some other Flash 'applications', like a video/audio player storing settings like volume levels.
Remember this site? http://burnallgifs.org
We need a similar campaign for Adobe Flash. It's dinosaur technology built for the internet stone age. Time to get rid of it for good.
"The world rolled its eyes when the problem of Flash cookies came to light several months ago.[...]"
There, fixed that for you.
Surf using a virtual machine and revert to a stored snapshot upon close. Problem solved.
After that feature, could they make Flash respect the "Block Pop Up Windows" features in Safari and Firefox? I expect NO popups when I have this set.. yet Flash seems to be able to open them still!
When spoken in the context of Flash, then yes, it makes perfect sense to not have those pesky 'shared objects' aka cookies on your machine.
However, with the advent of Flex (now Flashbuilder to confuse and confound more), there are many applications out there that legitimately store information on the client.
There has been a large mention of games already, but to that mix, I would add business software. There are many RIA's out there that manage data and distribution using Flex, and hence, pull a large amount of information from servers. Yes, sure, you could reload the data every time that you navigate away from a particular flash harness page, or you could store data within the shared object and not need to spend the vendor's bandwidth, nor stuff the client's pipe with information that was just sent a few minutes ago.
With the introduction of P2P channels in Flex 4, this opens up a whole range of possibilities to send data to a cluster of peers on a destination network, rather than clogging up outgoing pipes with information. There are a range of business cases for this technology.
That said, however, there is a need to curb the wild west attitude to data storage. There should be an option to default allow/deny/question whether Shared Objects should be allowed. Currently it is auto accept up to 100kb which falls outside of many legitimate applications anyway. Most importantly, there should be an option to always allow shared objects from a particular website.
We can't let the abuse of a technology proclude us from legitimate use when there are perfectly valid and reasonable strategies to manage and distinguish between positive and negative use cases.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Does HTML5 provides for the same level of rich client platform development as Flash/Flex? With numerous widgets just like in Motif/MFC, just easier to use? (MXML just shines in GUI development, far beyond of what Motif/MFC/AWT/Swing offer).
Does HTML5 allows you to play video with some advertisement in a running text over it?
Does HTML5 protects your video site from hotlinking? I.E. can you make sure that nobody can embed your videos into their pages and make sales while you pay for the bandwidth?
Sorry, HTML5 'video', 'audio' tags and other dings and wistles... you have your place (probably on YouTube), but you ain't gonna replace Flash anytime soon. Especially not on commercial sites (like pr0n tubes), not for RCP development either. World needs a full-blown rich client platform for the browsers and so far Adobe has been the only one who were able to provide a cross-platform, browser-independent solution. And they did it quite well, despite of some quirks. Sun with JavaFX has failed... would you like MS to take over with their Windows-only Silverlight technology?
The reason is that third party ad sites use Flash ads.
You visit site A which is about midget pr0n, third party site drops a cookie there.
You reset your IP address.
You visit site B which is about beer bongs, same third party sees the cookie it dropped when you were at site A, stores that info combined with your IP in a database.
You visit site C which is about fart lighting, same third party fetches the LSO and knows that you have been to the above two sites even though you had "pr0n mode" active on your browser which clears cookies.
On some sites, every page you click on, ad servers check the LSO and can build a definite profile on you that follows you even if the browser clears cookies, and even when you change IPs.
Later on, you enter some username/password information in on a site. *bam* They now have a name to the profile and browser history. This now can be sold to anyone who wants it, be it an estranged spouse, a would-be employer, or an adversary in a lawsuit who will use the information in front of a jury to humilate.
This is a great boon for data miners, not a good thing for consumers.
Someone mentioned it in passing but I'll say it directly: FlackBlock
I'm not one to turn off the web with NoScript or not contribute to sites I'm visiting by using AdBlock. FlashBlock is a great compromise. Normal ads, no stupid flash instability. Click on the flash when actually want it to run for where it's actually needed. You'll be surprised how well it works.
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
Yeah, but the advertising networks that advertise on the midget pr0n site, the beer bong site, the church site, etc. are all pushing Flash ads from the same domain and know what sites their ads were served from, so his hypothesis isn't all that flawed.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
World needs a full-blown rich client platform for the browsers and so far Adobe has been the only one who were able to provide a cross-platform, browser-independent solution.
Sorry what do you mean by "Cross-Platform and Browser-Independent" solution ?
The damn thing only runs mostly correctly on Windows and Mac OS X, and is half broken on Linux. And that's only 32bits support - the 64bits support is currently catastrophic.
In the 90s, when Windows and Mac OS were the only platforms, your sentence would have had made sense.
In 2010, where smartphones are pervasive, when every single gadget seems to be internet-enabled, Flash is a big problem because it only runs on a fraction of what a modern user may find.
The iPhone has no official Adobe Flash support, for exemple.
Either Flash should die and get replaced by modern standards such as HTML5/CSS/Javascript/etc. (that's my preferred solution)
Or, Adobe should open their Flash and release some freely accessible specifications (and grant free use for any submarine patents) so people like the Gnash dev team could provide 100% compatible support for any platform under the sun.
But the current situation is far from the cross-platform heaven we need.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]