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FedEx Will Pay You $5 To Install Flash (theregister.co.uk)
FedEx's Office Print department is offering customers $5 to enable Adobe Flash in their browsers. Why would they do such a thing you may ask? It's because they want customers to design posters, signs, manuals, banners and promotional agents using their "web-based config-o-tronic widgets," which requires Adobe Flash. The Register reports: But the web-based config-o-tronic widgets that let you whip and order those masterpieces requires Adobe Flash, the enemy of anyone interested in security and browser stability. And by anyone we mean Google, which with Chrome 56 will only load Flash if users say they want to use it, and Microsoft which will stop supporting Flash in its Edge browser when the Windows 10 Creators Update debuts. Mozilla's Firefox will still run Flash, but not for long. The impact of all that Flash hate is clearly that people are showing up at FedEx Office Print without the putrid plug-in. But seeing as they can't use the service without it, FedEx has to make the offer depicted above or visible online here. That page offers a link to download Flash, which is both a good and a bad idea. The good is that the link goes to the latest version of Flash, which includes years' worth of bug fixes. The bad is that Flash has needed bug fixes for years and a steady drip of newly-detected problems means there's no guarantee the software's woes have ended. Scoring yourself a $5 discount could therefore cost you plenty in future.
I said that a few months ago. I never figured someone would actually attempt to do so.
And yes it still applies.
Every other month it seems, we get an urgent notice from IT reminding us to either uninstall or update Flash.
Unfortunately, I have to have Flash installed on my work computers because the corporate-required "training" courses that they keep on making us take require Flash - such as the one on "information security" about how important it is to keep our software up to date.
So, basically, I have to have Flash installed so I can tick off a little checkbox that says I know not to install software like Flash.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The Html5 canvas has been widely available since 2006, and FedEx is a $50B/yr company. Why would it take them more than a decade to update a legacy app to a modern platform? Instead of paying their customers to install malware, they should hire some competent developers.
FedEx is not paying anyone to install flash. Instead, they are offering a $5 discount. There is a huge difference.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Heck, it should be easy to automate spinning up VM's, installing flash on a few different browsers in each, then collecting $5 for each. I'm guessing way more than $100 is possible.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Instead of paying their customers
They aren't paying you anything. Giving you a $5 discount off money you haven't spent yet is not the same as "paying you $5". If people actually fall for this scam, it saves FedEx a lot of money (they don't have to pay someone to write a non-flash app) and costs them exactly nothing.
The reason is simple: FedEx is not an "Internet company". It's old school offline business, and those companies often have managers/deciders in their 50s or 60s that grew up without Internet, and thus have still no idea how it works. They think in decades, and forget that a decade in online business is like a century in old school business. To line it up: the managers at FedEx who decided about the Flash campaign probably think they are super modern, because 10 years ago they had read that Flash is a cool technology.
Sorry, no developers available to do the needful. This week it's Diwali, or some other week-long celebration in India when nobody goes to work, that outsourcing firms forget to mention when convincing companies to send all their jobs overseas...
Fedex outsources and uses H-1Bs, employing the standard tricks, many of their job postings have requirements nobody can possibly meet. Look at developer postings for Fedex and you'll find most of them require years of experience with something called "Fedex Developer Tool Chain." Of course, nobody outside the company has that experience, so Fedex can wave their hands and say, "See, we can't find any qualified Americans to hire!" And more jobs get shipped out of America.
I'm guessing way more than $100 is possible.
Read TFA before you spend much time on that project. Blame goes to the clickbait headline, but still.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> keep on making us take require Flash - such as the one on "information security" ...
> I have to have Flash installed so I can tick off a little checkbox that says I know not to install software like Flash.
That reminds me of a certain network security company. They have all of their employees take annual security training, provided by a third-party. In order to keep track of who has done the training, employees log in to the third-party site using their Active Directory credentials - the same credentials that have access to all of the company resources, and indirectly, customer networks.
Well that's kinda stupid, employees need to be pretty careful that they don't get phished into entering their AD credentials into the wrong third-party site. They better look carefully at the URL in that email from "corporate security", right? No can do, all incoming email has URLs obfuscated by the email "security" system so you can't tell where the URL points to without clicking it.
There's literally no way for employees to know if they are sending their AD credentials to the site they are required to send them to, or sending them to a phisher.
I'll pay you $20 not to install Flash.
Here's how it works.
1) Don't install Flash.
2) This will prevent you from spending $30 with FedEx, which you were planning to do to get that $5.
3) Send me $5.
#DeleteChrome