Re: [Gnash] Re: Gnash Video Codecs? (Dave Crossland)

[Rob Savoye]

Liam McDermott wrote:

> advised that--due to the nature of--DRM would probably never be
> supported under Linux, hence the choice of format (I suppose they could

  What an amazingly bad attitude... "We're in bed with large
corporations, so we have decided to ignore a percentage of possible
users.". it makes one wonder how accurate the news is they present, if
they give large corporations such attention.

> Is it wise to include the: 'Avoid Flash spyware!' on the Gnash website?
> Could it be construed as libellous? Not wishing to put any ideas into
> Adobe heads of course.

  Many of the Flash movies one downloads off the net have tracking in
them that records hits on a web site when that movie is played. I only
realized this when I first added working network support to Gnash. This
is trivially easy to do in a Flash movie in a way that you'd only notice
if you are running a packet sniffer. Many Flash movies also load part of
their content from other sites, so while this isn't spyware directly in
this case, you are still making network accesses the user is 100%
unaware of.

 This is why I added support for whitelists and blacklists to Gnash, so
the users can control what goes on under the hood. If you dig around on
the net, you'll see that many sites, like YouTube, set the Flash
"localdomain" to "*", that basically says load anything you want from
anywhere... I prefer a finer level of control for Gnash users.

  I don't believe we're accusing Adobe of anything, the problem is more
of an issue with people creating the Flash movies themselves. Remember,
Adobe didn't create Flash and it's lack of security, they just inherited
this mess when they bought MacroMedia.

        - rob -