Adobe uses copyfraud to preserve spyware

A free-as-in-surveillance-free Flash installer is gone thanks to a bogus copyright claim.

The death of Adobe Flash in January 2021 was long overdue; Adobe’s hyper-proprietary interactive runtime was a source of persistent, terrifying security vulnerabilities that had harmed web users for decades.

But the demise of Flash also meant that all the Flash-based media that had been created since its debut (as 1995’s “Futuresplash”) was snuffed out, orphaned, unplayable and lost to history.

Adobe may have skimped on security, but it spent lavishly on sales and marketing, so major media and public organizations locked up years and years of media and interactives in the Flash abandonware format.

All that meant that the reports of Flash’s death were greatly exaggerated. Adobe quietly kept the Flash player on life-support with an “enterprise” version for companies with unpayable, Flash-based technology debts.

And they licensed Flash Player to China’s Zhong Cheng Network, whose flash.cn site still offers Flash Player downloads. But that Flash Player comes bundled with commercial spyware and an Adobe-controlled killswitch that can remotely deactivate it.