Windows 8: the Built-in Flash Player Leads to Zero-day Attack

What’s the Operation System your computer runs now? Win XP, Vista, Win 7 or probably Windows 8? Microsoft’s every step is accompanied with great influences and changes. Although Windows 8 won’t be officially released until October 26th, RTM version has been applied by some enterprises to the daily work.

This time, Microsoft adds Adobe Flash Player to its IE10 browser as a default component rather than a third party plugin. One of the reasons for Windows 8 still contains the built-in Adobe flash player is that HTML seems not so stable in the market for the moment, since flash player gave up the Android mobile market.But the built-in touch-friendly adobe flash player in browser IE10 can only get upgrades delivered by Microsoft. On August 21st, Adobe has launched updates for 0-day attack, but still leaving the early users in danger of 0-day as the Firefox being patched while embedded version in Internet Explorer not.

"If you're using Internet Explorer 10 on any version of Windows 8, including the RTM bits available via MSDN or TechNet and the enterprise preview, you are at risk." warned Ed Bott on ZDNet. Right now, Operation Systems such as Windows7, Vista, XP, Linux, etc. can get patched through security updates.

Lessons drawn from Apple’s previous mistakes when built-in Java in Mac devices’ failing in updates bringing up the crazy spread of Flashback virus, should be a warning for Adobe and Microsoft’s Win 8. It is said that a security update will come through Windows Update in the GA timeframe- the target date of October 26 when Windows 8 will go on sale.

Before the problem being solved, users could pick Chrome, Firefox etc. as alternatives. Or disable the built-in Flash Player temporarily.Will flash lives in IE 10 of Windows 8?

Samsung’s Updates: Flash Player still Exists

Days later after Adobe’s announcement of withdrawing from the battle of mobile devices browser player with HTML5, no Flash Player download available from Google’s app store Play could be found these days.

 Along with this decision, there is supposed to be no certified version of Flash Player for Android 4.1. For older versions of Google OS, limited use of Flash Player is still I use. However, users have no choice but removing the player after updating to Android 4.1.

That’ to say if your mobile runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, then it won’t go well with Flash Player any more. Even for updated users, Adobe suggested you uninstalling Flash as the uncertified version could exhibit unpredictable behavior.

Then when it comes to Samsung Galaxy S3, many users are worrying about losing Flash Player upon its updating to Jelly Bean 4.1.1. Will that take place in next month (September)? The good news is that: Samsung and Adobe have officially stated that all users of Galaxy S3 I9300 would keep their Flash Player, when upgrade from Android 4.0 ICS to Jelly Bean.

Actually, S3 users should know that Flash websites do work smoothly largely because of Samsung S3. Well, the updates would be set on the fourth quarter of 2012 and Galaxy S3, S2, Note, Note 2 are all expected to equipped with JB.Samsung confirmed during its IFA 2012 keynote today that a Jelly Bean update is coming to both the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 10.1 "very soon." It’s good to know that Adobe Flash Player still exists in mobile and of Android after August 15th.

Flash Player Left Android Mobile

RealPlayer has just returned for Android, while flash player has left.How much further will it go on?

As a cross-platform, browser-based application runtime, Adobe Flash player provides uncompromised viewing of expressive applications, content, and videos, content, and videos across browsers and operating systems. It can be used for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications, and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or mobile devices.

But the application in mobile devices came to the end after Apple refused to allow the Flash Player within the inbuilt iOS web browser. About a week ago on August 15th, Adobe Systems officially declared no flash player for portable android devices anymore. Actually, Adobe has already made decision not to develop flash player for web on mobile.

 

Adobe once tried hard for portable devices, but was banned by Apple. Adobe will block new installs of Flash on Android, essentially removing its presence from the mobile world. People say that Adobe would have turned its purpose on Android, but never effectively marketed its integration features with Google’s popular mobile OS. iOS never stands behind it as Steve Jobs expressed in April 2010: iPhone, iPod and iPad would never have flash player found.

Is the era of html 5 for mobile coming as flash player die away? On another hand, the exit of mobile field of flash player actually means to give up a greater market-85% Android OS of the whole mobile market.

Android 4.1 does not allow installation of flash player, and now it’s official. From then on, Adobe will disable all new installs of Flash player for Android. However, this never means this software or flash would disappear from people’s life. As a matter of fact, it still owns great advances over other player in the PC world-Google’s Chrome support it, by the way. Windows 8 from Microsoft still has built-in flash player since html 5 is not stable enough for the market. With all these changes in the internet world and portable devices, I wonder how long can flash last?　

Top New Features in Flash Player

Adobe® Flash® Player is a cross-platform, browser-based application runtime that provides uncompromised viewing of expressive applications, content, and videos across browsers and operating systems.


Stage 3D accelerated graphics rendering

Explore a new architecture for high-performance 2D/3D GPU hardware accelerated graphics rendering by Adobe, which provides low-level Stage3D APIs for advanced rendering in apps and gives framework developers classes of interactive experiences.

Native 64-bit support
Flash Player can now take advantage of native support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit web browsers on Linux®, Mac OS, and Windows®.


Multi-threaded video decoding

Deliver live streaming and real-time interactive video with improved playback performance and increased frame rates of high bit rate content running on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.



Enhanced mouse controls and relative coordinates

Create immersive, panoramic games for new classes of content, including first-person games that take advantage of infinite scrolling, mouse lock, relative mouse coordinates, and right- and middle-click events.


From adobe

What is Adobe Flash Player?

The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other Macromedia and third party tools. Flash Player was created by Macromedia and now developed and distributed by Adobe Systems after its acquisition. Flash Player supports vector and raster graphics, 3D graphics, an embedded scripting language called ActionScript and streaming of video and audio. ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, and supports object-oriented code, and may be compared to JavaScript. Flash Player has a wide user base, with over 90% penetration on internet connected personal computers,and is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into web pages.

Flash Player is freely available as a plugin for recent versions of web browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari) on selected platforms. Google Chrome integrated the player into the distribution. Each version of the plugin is backwards-compatible.

Flash Player is used internally by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (Adobe AIR), in order to provide a cross-platform runtime environment for desktop applications and mobile applications. The runtime supports installable applications on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and some mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android. Flash applications must specifically be built for the Adobe AIR runtime in order to utilize additional features provided, such as file system integration, native client extensions, native window/screen integration, taskbar/dock integration, and hardware integration with connected Accelerometer and GPS devices.
from wikipedia