Adobe And Facebook - Match Made?
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Better Flash development for Facebook developers. This seems like a great idea and at first pass, I cannot think of one thing that would be a problem here. But despite this otherwise great news, considering the growing malicious acts taking place on the social media landscape, I cannot help but wonder if adding in this new Flash functionality is actually opening up a potential Pandora’s box of problems?
Yet on the flip side, this translates into new opportunities for Flash devs using Facebook as their platform of choice. What with the Web 2.0 being all the rage these days, any security concerns with new functionality may very well fall onto deaf ears.
Rich, fun to use apps for Facebook thanks to Adobe’s efforts. What do you think, are we on a task to many new good things? Or instead, should we be concerned? Speaking for myself, I have serious reservations about adding new functionality with a platform that has zero real security to prevent potential abuse, but this is just me.
4 Comments
Brian
April 15th, 2009
at 11:44pm
MySpace helped pave the way, security-wise. There were a lot of issues with FP6, quite a few in FP7, but from FP8 on, there have been controls added on the HTML side where MySpace and Facebook can lock Flash down.
With Flash 10 and using strict security settings in the embed code, an XSS attack is highly improbable. You can even prevent Flash from redirecting the browser (which, if done automatically, leads to easy phishing attacks). I think it will even prevent Flash from changing the pages location when the user clicks a button in Flash!
In my opinion, Facebook’s Flash will probably be as safe or safer than MySpace’s, even from day one, thanks to the security enhancements of recent versions.
S.W.
April 15th, 2009
at 11:51pm
If you read the dev notes and security fixes for each Flash release, you’ll learn that Adobe goes out of their way to limit the ability of malicious Flash content to do very much harm. In many ways this makes Flash far less “dangerous” than many of the problems injected into the web through javascript and AJAX. Most of the people who fret about the “riskiness” of Flash are repeating FUD and haven’t actually bothered to read and understand the relative risks. Unfortunately articles like this one just perpetuate the FUD. So as some poorly informed people wring their hands asking if opening the platform to Flash is the harbinger of doom, try looking into the facts.
bud
April 16th, 2009
at 12:00am
I think it is a bad idea (but perhaps intentional), as it closes off the iPhone to facebook apps which might work via Mobile Safari, the mobile version of Facebook pushed to the iphone and other mobile platforms, or possibly usable via the Facebook iPhone app, simply because Adobe is making a push to Facebook app developers to convert their applications to Flash.
And the iPhone doesn’t use Flash.
I’m tired of the consumer suffering over turf wars. If Flash had never become a video wrapper, encroaching on Quicktime territory, I don’t think this ever would have become a problem. ALthough there are other reasons to hate Flash
Shane Eckel
April 16th, 2009
at 2:06pm
read actionscript essentials 3.0.