What if there existed a smart camera that could constantly analyze the scene in your home or office and alert you when someone enters carrying a gun? That dream may or may not become a reality, and it all depends on whether or not nanoWatt Design can manage to raise the $200,000 it needs to jump-start production in the next 34 days.
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The writing has been on the wall for quite a while. Flash is dying a slow death, yet it continues to gasp for air. After some new vulnerabilities were discovered, many have been calling for the plug to be pulled.
Facebook’s Chief Security Officer called for its demise the other day.
“It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day,” he said. “Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.”
Then, Mozilla blocked all versions of Flash in Firefox after security researchers discovered vulnerabilities that affect various operating systems, that hadn’t been patched.
Yes, this was temporary. Adobe issued an update on Tuesday about a resolution for the vulnerabilities. Here’s thecompany’s statement in full:
A few days ago we were notified of two vulnerabilities within the Flash Player that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of an affected system. Upon investigation, we confirmed and fixed the issues, and took steps to ensure that this class of attack cannot be used as a future attack vector.
We released an update to Flash Player this morning, and are proactively pushing the update out to users. We are also working with browser vendors to distribute the updated player.
We would like to thank Dhanesh Kizhakkinan of FireEye and Peter Pi of TrendMicro and slipstream/RoL for reporting the issues and working with us to help us quickly address them.
Flash Player is one of the most ubiquitous and widely distributed pieces of software in the world, and as such, is a target of malicious hackers. We are actively working to improve Flash Player security, and as we did in this case, will work to quickly address issues when they are discovered.
We continue to partner with browser vendors to both improve Flash Player security as well as invest in, contribute to and support more modern technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
Nothing in there about killing Flash. Still, the calls for its death continue.
Wired, one of the most well known magazines in tech, published an article on Wednesday called, “Flash. Must. Die.” In that, the technology is called “That insecure, ubiquitous resource hog everyone hates to need.”
The headlines related to Flash are rarely positive. Earlier this year, YouTube deprecated Flash embeds and its Flash API. Then Google started automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5. Flash can potentially hurt websites in search rankings. Google even announced that it would try to save people’s laptop batteries by pausing Flash in Chrome.
Despite the wide disdain for Flash, it’s still being very heavily used in advertising. We recently looked at a study from Sizmek, which called this a “major issue”.
What’s happening is that Flash ads that would otherwise be dynamic are appearing as static images on mobile device, and this can ultimately cost the advertiser clicks and conversions.
“This raises questions as to whether or not marketers are aware of how many of their ads are not being seen properly and how much ad spend they are wasting,” a spokesperson for the firm tells WebProNews.
“As mobile inventory grows, the channel is also changing, particularly in the realm of rich media. The days of Flash-supported inventory on mobile devices are numbered,” the report says. “iOS devices have never had native Flash support, and it’s been six full operating system versions since Android devices supported Flash. This means that only 11% of Android devices are capable of supporting Flash, and those devices are running significantly out-of-date software. Because mobile support for Flash inventory is nearly extinct, rich media ad formats that rely on Flash are likely to default – or revert to a single, static image – nearly 100% of the time. This means 5.35 billion rich media impressions served to mobile devices were squandered in Q1 of 2015 alone.”
According to Sizmek’s findings, only 8.3% of HTML5 impressions defaulted, while these formats represent less than half of rich media ads served to mobile devices.
“The Flash mobile default problem isn’t exclusive to just a few advertisers,” the report notes. “Among campaigns that served at least 1 million impressions in Q1, the average default rate was 35.2%. Many advertisers had it much worse than that – 36% of the advertisers in this sample defaulted much more than average, including the 12% of advertisers that never successfully served a rich media ad to a mobile device. The rate of rich media failure was much lower on desktop inventory, where 60% of advertisers defaulted at a rate of less than 3%.”
You can take a look at the full report here.
The post Should You Be Using Flash? appeared first on SecurityProNews.
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Netflix is awesome but you’ll have to pay more for it in the future. Per The Guardian, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings this week told users to brace for price increases in the future, although he said that they would be gradual and wouldn’t happen overnight.
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In a couple of months, Apple will launch two new iPhones that will probably sell extremely well from the moment they become available for preorder. For Samsung, that’s both good and bad news, as the company will make plenty of money on the new iPhones, and it will also see sales of its own devices take another hit.
Either way, Samsung is already preparing for a massive iPhone 6s launch on both fronts, according to reports. The company is reportedly pushing up its Galaxy Note 5 launch, while mass-production of a boatload of components for the new iPhones kicks off at the same time.
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Microsoft is preparing for one of its most critical Windows updates in its history, the Windows 10 release that will be available as a free download to consumers who already own genuine Windows 7 and Windows 8 copies. Beginning on July 29th, the update will be rolled out gradually, with Windows 10 retail boxes supposed to reach retailers at some point after that. But Microsoft is also working on new hardware for Windows 10, and a report already shares some exciting details for the next-gen Surface tablet.
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If ever a Mustang looked like a rocket, this is it. It commands attention with its stripes, stance, flags, and amazing wheels.
Read more here:: Mustang 360
Each passing year it seems that fewer and fewer kids are getting into the automotive hobby. Could the future generation of gearheads be dwindling?
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We have a soft spot for the Fox Capri, and this one is here to stay.
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With all of the commotion and intrigue surrounding the New Horizons spacecraft approaching Pluto, the BBC recently highlighted an incredible interactive piece they put together last year which provides an engaging and informative approach to answering a question most everyone has wondered at some point in their lives: just how big is the Universe?
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Tuesday was a big celebration for space nerds everywhere, as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft swung by Pluto and captured the clearest images we’ve ever seen of the dwarf planet. This also spawned a celebration all over the Internet, as people took to Twitter to post their clever Pluto memes that featured celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Donald Trump and, yes, Pluto the dog. Check out our favorites below.
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