Microsoft's Flash Competitor Not Dead After All

Flash coming to iPhone and iPad - really

Flash coming to iPhone and iPad - really

"Skyfire, which will be available for download at 9 a.m. ET on Thursday for $2.99, is the first such application to receive Apple's approval for distribution in its App Store.

To get around Apple's restriction, Skyfire came up with an innovative solution: When users click on a page that contains Flash video, Skyfire's servers download, render and translate the video into HTML5, which is a Web standard that iOS devices support. Skyfire then displays a thumbnail that users can click on to stream the video from its servers."



Updated: "Skyfire for iPhone - It came, it didn't work, it evaporated" ZDNet

D8: Apple CEO Steve Jobs Talks

In his fifth appearance at D: All Things Digital, Jobs speaks with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about his well-known issues with Flash.


D8: Steve Jobs on Apple's Relationship With Google Onstage at D8, Jobs talks about Apple's relationship with Google.


D8: Steve Jobs on iAds Restrictions Jobs responds to a question about data collection and retention with a story about Flurry Analytics.


D8: Steve Jobs on the Gizmodo Story Jobs talks candidly about Apple's situation with Gizmodo, the site that bought an iPhone prototype found in a bar.


D8: Steve Jobs on Television Jobs talks about the problem with getting involved in television technology.


Jobs answers a question from the audience about whether AT&T's service for the iPhone will get better anytime soon.


D8: Steve Jobs on FoxConn Jobs answers questions from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about FoxConn, the Chinese manufacturer that has recently been the site of a number of suicides.


KatieCam: AOL Nightcap Gathering Katherine Boehret brings KatieCam to the D8 nightcap gathering, sponsored by AOL. Singer Natasha Bedingfield provided the musical tunes for the exciting event. Along with many interviews of peoples thoughts on what they just heard from Steve Jobs.

Do you hate Adobe Flash?

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So your viewing a Flash video and it's using all your CPU or crashing your web browser. Youtube has a new demo posted that demonstrates the potential of rendering 3D graphics in the browser, using O3D, an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. The app shown in the video is coded in javascript and html and runs in a web browser. Learn more about O3D at http://code.google.com/apis/o3d

Flash Cookies and Privacy, are you being tracked?

So you think your practicing safe computing and you manage your web browsers cookies but did you know chances are more likely then not you are being tacked by cookies even if you have deleted them all?

This may come as a surprise to many computer users but there is a new cookie in town and its called an Adobe Flash cookie. Adobe's Flash program plug-in, which is used to view multimedia content and is installed on millions of computers worldwide, also stores cookies for user preferences such as the volume level of a video. Check out the Wikipedia entry here.

A recent study found that more then half of the Internets top sites are using Flash cookies and most of those are not informing users that they are also being tracked by these extra cookies. Furthermore information on how people navigate those sites even if people believe they've restricted the data collection, according to a new study.

According to the study:
"That means that privacy-sensitive consumers who 'toss' their HTTP cookies to prevent tracking or remain anonymous are still being uniquely identified online by advertising companies,"

"Since users do not know about Flash cookies, it stands to reason that users lack knowledge to properly manage them,"

There are big differences in HTTP cookies and Fash cookies too. For example they have no expiration date by default and they're stored in a different location than HTTP cookies and can contain up to 100KB of information, whereas HTTP cookies can only have 4KB.

"These differences make Flash cookies a more resilient technology for tracking than HTTP cookies and creates an area of uncertainty for user privacy control,"

Many Online advertising companies, however, have embraced Flash cookies since many people regularly delete HTTP cookies.

How can I manage or remove Adobe Flash cookies?

Global Storage Settings panel
Adobe provides a web page with at Global Storage Settings panel that will allow you to manage your Adobe Flash cookies

Flush.app

A Cookie Removal Tool For OS X

Better Privacy

A Firefox add-on called Better Privacy


Manual Removal

Mac OS X:
For Web sites, ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects////

If your eyes have not glazed over yet you may also want to read:

Study: Adobe Flash cookies pose vexing privacy questions

Study: Flash Cookies Track Even Privacy-conscious Surfers

Flash Cookies and Privacy

Adobe patches 12 Flash bugs, 3 caused by Microsoft

Adobe on Thursday patched 12 vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including three it inherited from faulty Microsoft development code and one that hackers have been exploiting for at least a week.

In a security advisory published Thursday afternoon, Adobe briefly spelled out the dozen vulnerabilities, 10 that were pegged as potentially leading to hijacked systems or with hackers executing their own malware on a machine.

The vulnerabilities affect the Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Flash Player. Still to patch: the Solaris edition.

Flash Player 9.0.246.0 and 10.0.32.18 for Windows, Mac and Linux can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site. Alternately, users can use Flash's built-in automatic update mechanism to grab the new versions.

Read the full story by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld US

Grab your BFG and play Doom in your browser

Yes, Doom 1 has been recompiled in Flash from the original source. It plays just like I remembered the original, and could definitely become a giant Time Waster for anyone else who was hooked on Doom when it was first released. Adobe Flash 10 is required.

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