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FTC Is In Talks With Adobe About the 'Flash Problem'

Posted by timothy on from the would-you-like-a-delicious-cookie dept.

jamie links to news that the FTC is talking with Adobe about persistent Flash cookies. "Flash isn't actually necessary to watch YouTube videos, but the rest of this article is interesting."

4 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. What if the local storage is made zero? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Flash player settings has an option to set the amount of local storage permitted for the player. What happens if I set that amount to zero and mark it permanent (i.e. check box remember)? Would it remove the ability of the flash player to set cookies?

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    1. Re:What if the local storage is made zero? by characterZer0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have read that rm -rf ~/.adobe; mkdir ~/.adobe; chmod 000 ~/.adobe does the trick. Can anybody confirm?

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      Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
    2. Re:What if the local storage is made zero? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I actually use Linux, what scares me is that the ONLY closed source piece of software on my computer is flash.
      I think Adobe knows, or hopes, that they will one day be providing massive amounts of video content from actual television channels and Cable Company's and the only way to build some kind of content protection system, DRM, or paid service model would be to keep Flash closed.

    3. Re:What if the local storage is made zero? by jawtheshark · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Probably would work... Well, I'd simply do "rm ~/.adobe/*; chmod 500 ~/.adobe/*", which would be shorter and keep read/access rights to said directory.

      That said, if Flash expects to be able to write to that directory, it might crash when it tries to utilize it. So it really isn't a foolproof method.

      As per this moment, under .adobe in my home directory exists the following structure: "~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache/VSUUJTSX/". The directory is probably randomly generated just like profile directories in Mozilla (harder to predict in case of a flaw in the plugin/browser). In there are just files with the extensions .swz and .heu and one file called "cacheSize.txt". None of these files seems to be human readable (well, okay cacheSize.txt makes somehow sense). Oddly enough, the oldest file is from 25th September 2010. As I use my browser daily and don't mind youtube or the odd flash game, this is strange indeed. I would nearly say that they stopped using it.

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