Adobe already open sourced the core of the Flash Player

[zwetan]

In 2006, at the same time Adobe released Flash Player v9.0 and Adobe AIR v1.0, they open sourced the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) and donated the project to the Mozilla Foundation.

see

• Wikipedia - Tamarin (software)
• Brendan Eich - Project Tamarin
• Frank Hecker - Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin

This project Tamarin was hosted on mercurial under 2 main branches

• tamarin-central (not working)
• tamarin-redux (working)
• Tamarin Bugzilla
• Tamarin-devel Archives

Later, after the project was not publicly updated anymore, Adobe moved the sources to a repository named avmplus on github

• adobe-flash/avmplus
• adobe/avmplus (latest)

---

If Adobe wanted to open source the Flash Player, that AVM2 would be the first thing that would need to be open sourced, and so they already did.

If you look at the repositories, the bugzilla, etc. Adobe was very serious about it, they did not drop the sources and let other people deal with it, they assigned many developers and fully embraced the open source development cycle.

Out of this project only a little part (the NanoJIT got reused by Mozilla in Firefox), but mostly nobody else contributed any code ... for years.

In short, nobody really showed any interest.

---

As a very tiny open source dev I took on the Tamarin sources and around 2008
published another OSS project: Redtamarin

The goal was simple, reuse the goodness of AVM2 but develop the API side and if possible provide an open source implementation of the Flash API (as much as it makes sense for the CLI).

For close to 10 years, I had exactly zero contributors, especially around 2010 after a special letter of a special someone "WHAT? AS3 on the server-side? you crazy!!!"

Let's be clear I'm not complaining, I'm perfectly happy with my own little OSS project, it does scratch my own hitch, it even lead to interesting side project tools like as3shebang (yep running AS3 as shell scripts, I do admin a dozen Linux server with that).

But I still have a point, what make people think that getting the sources of the Flash Player will magically solve the problem ?

First, the project due to its cross-platform nature is kind of complex, go ahead get the avmplus sources and compile it, then compile it for the different CPU architectures, for different operating systems, it's a whole production.

Second, now imagine that the Flash Player sources are similar to the avmplus sources but probably twice as big and twice as complex, if not bigger than that. Unless you have a team working on it full time, it's unlikely you can publish anything from it.

Third, even if you have the sources, the contributors working on it, all the browser vendors plan to remove completely the support for plugins (they already killed NPAPI), how do you get users to install a plugin that cannot be installed anymore ?

---

imho you are trying to solve the wrong problem

The problem is not the Flash Player not being open sourced
The problem is the browsers not supporting the installation of plugin

A fork of Chromium/WebKit/Firefox to keep the support for plugin, even with a closed source Flash Player would have more chance to succeed.

[pakastin]

Good points! The reason I put this on GitHub was that I don't know everything, so it's good to gain knowledge what's the situation!

[pakastin]

What about .fla?

There's many people discussing about the issues, I'm not alone:
https://twitter.com/bit101/status/890210621542678529
https://twitter.com/TomFulp/status/889883079137005570
https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/890051049259663361

...so there must be something missing still?

[zwetan]

OK, let's try to define the problem:

People want to preserve the experience of playing SWF in the browser

to be able to do that you need 3 elements

• a Flash Player plugin
• a browser that allow to install plugin (either NPAPI or PPAPI)
• domains that keep hosting their SWF content

All the major browser vendors: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge/IE, Apple Safari
have done the following

• removed the capability to install/run NPAPI plugins, except Flash
• blocked the Flash plugin to run automatically, eg. Click-to-Run, except for some whitelisted domains

and they announced to plan the following

• by mid to late 2018, require the permission for Flash to run each session
• in mid to late 2019, disable the Flash plugin by default
  users will be able to re-enable the plugin, but still this will require user approval to run the plugin
• by end of 2020, they will remove the ability to run the Flash plugin
  eg. "Users will no longer have any ability to enable or run Flash."

So by end of 2020 to still be able to

People want to preserve the experience of playing SWF in the browser

you can either

• emulate it, eg. allow users to play SWF file without the need of a plugin
  that's the Shumway approach
• convert it to another format, eg. take a SWF and output HTML5/JS/etc.
  that's the Swiffy approach
• play it outside the browser, either fork one of the major browsers
  or use another browser that still allow to play SWF because it still support plugin

"emulate it" and "convert it" are both hard problems,
both Shumway and Swiffy, while being supported by big companies like Google or Mozilla,
have been abandoned.

Open sourcing the Flash Player could help a project like Shumway,
but it would still be a hard problem to solve.

And if Flash Player is open sourced why not also make a petition to open source something like Swiffy ?

What about .fla?

You can still use .fla files in Animate CC, and for the older .fla that can not be opened
you can still install in parallel old Flash CC / Flash Pro CS6 / etc. to open those

But you would still have another problem: the hosting of the SWF.

By 2020, when all browsers does not play SWF, even if you have something like Shumway that can play SWF, I doubt the domains who have huge catalog of SWF files like miniclip, kongregate. armorgame, etc. will still hosts those SWF files for the fun of it.

Also, those SWF files are not easily archived because they also depends on the domain providing an API, take miniclip for example, every single SWF game is loaded by a "game loader" that provide an API such as login, saving the score, multiplayer, etc.

Most of those SWF games are domain locked, you can not just download the SWF and play it local.

[pakastin]

For me personally the no. 1 issue is that how do I revisit my old projects (from 1999 AS2 to AS3), which I have in either .fla, .swf or some newer format..

[zwetan]

the simplest approach is to use Adobe AIR
it does embed a browser (old Safari WebKit) and support the Flash Player plugin

from AIR 1.0 to AIR 21, the Flash plugin was embedded into the AIR runtime
from AIR 22, the AIR runtime use the plugin installed on the system

see Flash Player and AIR 22 Release Notes

System level Flash Player support for AIR desktop applications

Starting in AIR 22, applications that play swf content via the HTML control (WebKit) will now load the system level NPAPI Flash Player provided by Adobe (https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer). If this plugin is not available on the system, the end user will be prompted to download and install the plugin from Adobe.

"as is" you can create a small wrapper in AIR, that create an HTMLLoader that will act as a "small" browser and that can play SWF file embed in HTML.

Either from a domain or from a local file.

[fellowpacker]

I think WaterFox is still permitting people to run the plugins THEY like. It allows running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins and also running of unsigned extensions. See waterfoxproject.org or github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox

[ROBERT-MCDOWELL]

yes, but Waterfox is dependent from mozilla code....

[ROBERT-MCDOWELL]

zwetan:
this can be only a trick, I think the best for all of us would be to hijack flash PPAPI and create it open source asap, because since FP 21 some important features and updates have been done

[zwetan]

@madovsky
but all the browser vendors plan to remove the capability to run plugins
open sourcing the Flash Player will not change that

[devlfm]

@zwetan what about prepare redtamarin to render on webgl with skia? remember me? ^^

[zwetan]

@devlfm
yes I remember and answer is still the same, redtamarin is about the CLI
a bit off topic to talk about that here, but I can say that
I keep the focus/scale of the project to the amount of what can be implemented
by the current size of the team, eg. 1 dev

[pakastin]

I'm still confused whether Adobe has already open sourced Flash or not? Only partly?

[mustang2247]

I believe flash will get reborn. but we can do more things exceed html5(js + css) and make the simple to flash air (stupid ane)

[demurgos]

They open sourced the ActionScript VM which is part of the Flash Player. It is a good starting point but this is not enough.

[pakastin]

Is it this? https://github.com/adobe-flash/avmplus

Updated 4 years ago

...

[ghost]

I wish adobe did the same with shockwave and director and did some more documentation like they did with flash. I think there was a program years ago that can take a DCR or DIR program and extract out the lingo code and anything else, but I'm still trying to find it.

[demurgos]

@pakastin See the first message, there are two repos:

• adobe-flash/avmplus
• adobe/avmplus (latest)

The second one was updated last year.

[zwetan]

2 main projects were open sourced

• Flex SDK
  contains the compilers: ASC, MXMLC, COMPC
  that what allow to compile AS3/MXML sources to bytecode
  and the sources for the Flex framework which basically
  allow to architecture apps with AS3 and MXML
• avmplus
  that's what allow to interpret/execute ActionScript Bytecode
  it is at the core of both the Flash Player and the Adobe AIR runtimes
  it contains mainly the AS3 builtins (String, Number, Array, etc.)
  and few other classes like ByteArray, Proxy, etc.
  but the crucial part missing are the definitions of the native classes
  you can find in the Flash API and the AIR API, for ex:
  flash.display.Sprite, flash.media.Sound, flash.net.Socket, etc.

The Flex SDK was open sourced from the beginning (well almost.. since Flex 3) under Adobe umbrella, and later on they donated the project to the Apache Foundation and the project is now known as The "Apache Flex SDK".

It's quite important to have the compilers open sourced, also new compilers (next gen) have been developed: Falcon and FalconJX, which lead to another "side project" FlexJS which allow to compile AS3 sources to JS sources.

And on top of that, Adobe also open sourced WebkitAIR which is how they can embed a browser engine inside Adobe AIR with some neat features like being able to execute AS3 code from the JS side.

In all those projects, the first common problem is the Flash API.
In fact, it is the same problem that faced Shumway and other project.

The Flash API is quite complete and quite mature, it is not something you implement in a couple of months, it is much harder than that.

Even if dev like AS3 as a programming language, or the tools like the compilers or animation tools like Animate CC that can generate SWF, the real sauce that allow them to be creative is the Flash API.

The second big problem is the GUI rendering, the vector rendering engine of Flash is quite good and not that easy to replicate, if you go into things like Stage3D it get even harder to replicate.

What could be done now, providing enough developers were contributing to such big project

• take avmplus, and implement on top the Flash API to a certain point (eg. not the rendering part)
• then add something like Skia to complete the Flash API (display list, Sprite, etc.)
• then add something like WebkitAIR to allow to embed an HTML renderer in that display list (same as flash.html.HTMLLoader)

with that you would get a somewhat equivalent open source version of Adobe AIR that could run on Windows, macOS and Linux but with not all the bells and whistles like Stage3D etc.

It would be quite an advanced and hard project.

But this project would still not play SWF files as you are used to run in the Flash Player, you would have to go into the details of the SWF spec and implement all those SWF tags and interpret/combine them into the avmplus sources and render some of them using Skia.

So, I'm not saying it is impossible, but it would certainly be extremely hard.

[pakastin]

OK, so it's not fully open source yet.

[PippoApps]

So let's seriously petition Adobe.
They have nothing to loose anyway.

[PippoApps]

Off topic sorry: disabling plugins, results in giants (Google, Apple, Facebook) sniffing in everything we do. In every variable of our code. This was the goal since the beginning. Open sourcing Flash Player might not bring any benefit if browser vendors do not allow plugins anyway.

[ROBERT-MCDOWELL]

PippoApps: not accept plugins anymore is a non sense, but not for the dev browsers themselves.
Rather than cooperate and find together a win win solution they just do whatever they want in the way to (as usual) kill the concurrence.
Mostly controlled by big money corp (yes, even firefox is owned by google). It's now a 20 years battle, and if we, developers and users don't say enough is enough, we want our own standard and browser as any open source allow, so they will win and it will be very hard to break it in the future, unless if the real economy will finally get the last word.

zwetan: I completely agree with your analyze, yes, flash is what it is today because it took 18 years,
I just want to remind that the success of Macromedia with flash at the start was because they asked to users what were their needs and wishes to make the web evolve, and they developed it (flash player & shockwave)
nothing is impossible indeed, the only way to succeed is to work together with a large amount of developers to divide the tasks. But I'm pretty sure that some very high skill retired developers would love to do it ;).

[photopea]

Guys, here is what I think should have happened many years ago, or will hopefully happen soon.

Somebody should simply write a Flash Player in Javascript (or in some other language, and compile to JS or WebAssembly), SWF specification is public and it seems to be even simpler than e.g. PDF (for which pdf.js exists). People are emulating the whole computers in browsers (to run any OS you want) - https://copy.sh/v86/, so emulating a virtual machine to "play SWF files" should not be a problem.

I know, that Flash allows creating TCP sockets and other "low-level" things, which are not possible with current web technologies. But the emulator could prevent it or "fake" it somehow, I hope most of games would run without it.

This would not depend on OS or a browser. It will run everywhere, just like any Javascript code runs the same way everywhere. And there would be no way browsers can stop us from "playing" these great SWF files in every browser for decades to come.

[zwetan]

Somebody should simply write a Flash Player in Javascript (or in some other language, and compile to JS or WebAssembly)

it already happened, and many years ago, see mozilla/shumway

also see the wikipedia shumway page

Development of Shumway has effectively ceased. Although the project remains available on GitHub (see External links), in February 2016, the project was moved to the "Firefox Graveyard" and is thus considered defunct from Mozilla's point of view.

the most recent project to try that again is ruffle-rs/ruffle

[Brian151]

Guys, here is what I think should have happened many years ago, or will hopefully happen soon.

Somebody should simply write a Flash Player in Javascript (or in some other language, and compile to JS or WebAssembly), SWF specification is public and it seems to be even simpler than e.g. PDF (for which pdf.js exists). People are emulating the whole computers in browsers (to run any OS you want) - https://copy.sh/v86/, so emulating a virtual machine to "play SWF files" should not be a problem.

I know, that Flash allows creating TCP sockets and other "low-level" things, which are not possible with current web technologies. But the emulator could prevent it or "fake" it somehow, I hope most of games would run without it.

This would not depend on OS or a browser. It will run everywhere, just like any Javascript code runs the same way everywhere. And there would be no way browsers can stop us from "playing" these great SWF files in every browser for decades to come.

1. yes, it is much simpler than PDF. i always hated how so many programs struggle with PDF, and i know why after reading the specs. it's a positively INSANE file format, just how unity decoder tools can't do too many productive things with THOSE for the same reason.

emulating flash player is indeed more than possible. the same applies for shockwave/director, which was only ever 'secure' from decompilers because it wasn't mainstream enough. by my observations, lingo code compilation is actually more lossless than actionscript. it's also probably easier to emulate under javascript. once the decoders are finished, that is. now, flash has some...annoying caveats that make things harder. animate HTML5 shows what happens when you don't properly process/render the shape format, for example. you get the ugly 'shape seams' that ruin vector artwork. but 'vector artwork shouldn't be rendered by clients, anyways, so who cares?' shm...

2. i think the "open standards" do in fact allow for this. any perfectly stand-alone flash game/movie will be fine without this, but a lot of games [like MMOs, which CAN still be saved] are tied to their servers. preserving them will require reverse-engineering their code and their network communications to make them work in the post-flash era. the easiest limitation to break would be the site lock. developers just cannot prevent a flash emulator from falsifying the web address the file was loaded on (;

3. i plan both to implement and extend the SWF format at some point in the future. debating my exact process for this, though... while i will facilitate the inclusion of code, i do not currently plan to facilitate its execution, as my primary goals are to leverage the asset formats. people who so gleefully preach the wonders of HTML5 are almost certainly not touching those raw APIs, or doing things which aren't exactly supported or feasible without severe performance degradation and tons of boilerplate code. the majority of HTML5 games are built with unity, construct, game maker, animate CC, RPGMaker, so on... All of which have their caveats and btw are commercial-proprietary black boxes just like flash and the flash player. only, much much worse. As someone who has tried with a mix of failure and success to wrangle the HTML5 APIs directly [which any proper library/api/framework should not be such a hassle], I think i'm more than qualified to speak to the HORRORS of dealing with them, and the things which they cannot do, or just shouldn't be used for. Some graphics effects practically mandate webGL or cutting some corners with quality/scope if you want performance.

// end that

beating a dead horse again:
they say flash player was so slow, but it runs exceptionally well in stand-alone mode. amazing no one bats an eye at how despite removing these layers of "slowdown" and "insecurity" that browsers consume so much more memory/CPU thane ever before, including all suffering from memory leaks that creep-up slowly until you have to restart them. not only that, but are full of exploits, and the oh-so-secure "open" web standards keep introducing newer ways to do malicious things. particularly 'dangerous' operations are globally blacklisted and developers/end-users continue to jump through hoops and opt for NO security just to keep doing what they want to do.

shumway:
Mozilla canning it doesn't surprise me, tbh... they quit caring about their end-users quite some time ago. they're also part of the main W3C circle and the hate-boner for adobe runs strong. something like shumway actually being completed would undermine the plans to kill flash/plugins off because suddenly you could continue playing flash files, independent of your operating system, and possibly without a plugin. [basically what unity did with webGL, but far as i know, the old unity games can't use the webGL loader since their code is actually stored in...embedded DLLs [scary!] ]

besides any malicious intents, they probably are trying to manage too many projects at once, as are most of these corporations. maintaining a web browser is already a task and a half, itself. note even the non-mainstream browsers tend to just fork code from the mainstream ones? or well, they start like that.

i know a guy was also working on porting shumway to work with pixijs, and he actually solved that shape seams issue, too... can't remember where he mentioned that anymore.

i only recently learned of ruffle. hopefully one of these projects will see completion some day. i so far haven't been sold on rust, however, and node/npm are/is an ABSOLUTE "no" in my book. i tried to load a rather simple SWF file on their demo site, and it did not work... i should file an issue, but too lazy/busy with my own things... also, i don't currently want to release the flash files i've been testing because they're either not appropriate, or it could undermine some of my archival/restoration projects.

[proneon267]

GNU Gnash is already open source. What more do you want?

[v-fox]

GNU Gnash is already open source. What more do you want?

As is nouveau nvidia driver. Ready to ditch the blob ?
How about exact specification for all of Flash's APIs and/or fully documented code, so 100% compliance of Gnash and Lightspark could be achieved instead of an exercise in guesswork ? Using Flash code directly would be dumb, it's most valuable as reference.

[zwetan]

even if you had the full source code of the Flash player plugin open sourced
it would be useless as all major browsers dropped support for plugins

[v-fox]

even if you had the full source code of the Flash player plugin open sourced
it would be useless as all major browsers dropped support for plugins

And yet I somehow have it enabled in my latest Firefox 77.0.1:

• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:X0F:HSF/MozillaFirefox
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:X0F:HSF/freshplayerplugin
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:X0F:HSF/flash-player
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:X0F:HSF/lightspark

Also, all implementation of Flash, open and not, have stand-alone players.

[zwetan]

by "all major browsers" you should have understood the "official distribution by the vendors"
in other terms what people get by default on their OS and/or when they download a browser

but sure you can compile anything by yourself and have various results, but then it is just for you

a bit like maintaining your own chromium fork and dicking around with few dozens users
while everyone else use Google Chrome

Also, all implementation of Flash, open and not, have stand-alone players.

a standalone player make it de facto something that run outside of the browser
does it solve the problem of a plugin running inside the browser?

nope

so about being useless, what's worth a plugin you can only compile or install for yourself on your own compiled browser ?

not much

distribution, availability and reachability were the killer features of Flash as a plugin

[v-fox]

by "all major browsers" you should have understood the "official distribution by the vendors"
in other terms what people get by default on their OS and/or when they download a browser

but sure you can compile anything by yourself and have various results, but then it is just for you

a bit like maintaining your own chromium fork and dicking around with few dozens users
while everyone else use Google Chrome

If you would follow those links you would find out that it's an optimization for the official build of openSUSE, you know, one of the biggest and oldest enterprise GNU/Linux distributions, which includes Flash and NPAPI/PPAPI shim by itself:

• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/mozilla:Factory/MozillaFirefox
• https://pmbs.links2linux.de/package/show/Essentials/flash-player

Also, all implementation of Flash, open and not, have stand-alone players.

a standalone player make it de facto something that run outside of the browser
does it solve the problem of a plugin running inside the browser?

nope

It solves the problem of decades worth of media being playable.

so about being useless, what's worth a plugin you can only compile or install for yourself on your own compiled browser ?

not much

It's worth more than your noise, that's for sure. You can go pay someone to compile or install things for you, if you're having troubles.

distribution, availability and reachability were the killer features of Flash as a plugin

I wasn't aware that we were discussing some kind of world domination plan for The Cult of Flash.
In any case, World Wide Web cannot rely on a binary closed-source virtual machines with unrestrained access to all of user's data, no matter their qualities. We can manage without a giant vendor-lock, thank you very much,

[zwetan]

whatever, I'm flipping the bozo bit

[PippoApps]

In any case, World Wide Web cannot rely on a binary closed-source virtual machines with unrestrained access to all of user's data, no matter their qualities. We can manage without a giant vendor-lock, thank you very much,
Isn't that exactly what Google Chrome and Microsoft do? Ah, and Apple with Safari.
Is that all open source stuff? did I miss anything?

[v-fox]

In any case, World Wide Web cannot rely on a binary closed-source virtual machines with unrestrained access to all of user's data, no matter their qualities. We can manage without a giant vendor-lock, thank you very much,

Isn't that exactly what Google Chrome and Microsoft do? Ah, and Apple with Safari.
Is that all open source stuff? did I miss anything?

Apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML#Descendants

KHTML and KJS were adopted by Apple in 2002 for use in the Safari web browser. Apple publishes the source code for their fork of the KHTML engine, called WebKit. In 2013, Google began development on a fork of WebKit, called Blink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE HTML (KHTML) layout engine and KDE JavaScript (KJS) engine. The WebKit project was started within Apple by Don Melton on June 25, 2001,[13] as a fork of KHTML and KJS. Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers[1] that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE

KDE is an international free software community[1] developing Free and Open Source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, Frameworks and a range of cross-platform applications like Krita or digiKam designed to run on Unix and Unix-like desktops, Microsoft Windows and Android
Being one of KDE's most recognized projects, the Plasma Desktop is a default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, KDE neon,[3][4] KaOS, Kubuntu, Manjaro KDE Edition, Netrunner, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE[5] and Solus Plasma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

Most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware.[8] WebKit was the original rendering engine, but Google eventually forked it to create the Blink engine; all Chrome variants except iOS now use Blink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

Chromium provides the vast majority of source code for Google Chrome, including the user interface, the Blink rendering engine, and the V8 JavaScript engine. Thus Google chose the "Chromium" name as an analogy of chromium metal forged into chrome plating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge

Originally built with Microsoft's own proprietary browser engine EdgeHTML and their Chakra JavaScript engine, Edge was rebuilt as a Chromium-based browser in 2019,[12][13] using the Blink and V8 engines.

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/third_party/blink
https://github.com/v8/v8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
Not that it all matters because, as crappy and obsolete as they are, HTML, JS, CSS and "Web 2.0" trash are open, public, royalty-free fully documented standards, unlike Flash. Personally, I'm more partial to sandbox'ed GPU-accelerated WebAssembly & WebGPU but nothing beats decentralized F/OSS E2EE native clients for decentralized services.

[PippoApps]

Chromium is the engine though, if I don't go wrong. Whatever is built around, including user login, password management, etc. is proprietary right?

[v-fox]

Chromium is the engine though, if I don't go wrong. Whatever is built around, including user login, password management, etc. is proprietary right?

Should I explain how browser's UI does not execute browsed code, thus having nothing to do with WHATWG & W3C standards, or are you going to come up with even more childish strawmen and non sequitur to that too ? And looking at how fast you replied tells me that you were not ignorant of that in the first place.

Or you might start explaining what that has to do with preserving Flash-based media by not making it rely on binary abandonware.

[PippoApps]

Should I explain how browser's UI does not execute browsed code, thus having nothing to do with WHATWG & W3C standards, or are you going to come up with even more childish strawmen and non sequitur to that too ? And looking at how fast you replied tells me that you were not ignorant of that in the first place

I am asking respectful and civilized questions because I might have wrong information. I don't know what you are projecting on me. If you had talked to me like this in real life you would have a swollen red face now kid. Ask your parents to teach you manners.

[Brian151]

ah, haven't seen toxicity here in a while...
that's lovely...

[v-fox]

Should I explain how browser's UI does not execute browsed code, thus having nothing to do with WHATWG & W3C standards, or are you going to come up with even more childish strawmen and non sequitur to that too ? And looking at how fast you replied tells me that you were not ignorant of that in the first place

I am asking respectful and civilized questions because I might have wrong information. I don't know what you are projecting on me. If you had talked to me like this in real life you would have a swollen red face now kid. Ask your parents to teach you manners.

Judging respectfulness is a prerogative of the addressed and to me it seems like disingenuous provocations, now turning to pompous and overtly hostile self-aggrandizement. Ignorant in search of education usually have sense to behave in front of those who they ask. Or, you know, just be "civilized" in general and not putting up false appearances.

ah, haven't seen toxicity here in a while...
that's lovely...

There seem to be some adults with developmental difficulties who like to play nasty contrarians and instigate holy-wars. This is why I think that all public repository & development sites should require personhood & citizenship confirmation via bank cards, state licenses or something like that.

[Brian151]

There seem to be some adults with developmental difficulties who like to play nasty contrarians and instigate holy-wars. This is why I think that all public repository & development sites should require personhood & citizenship confirmation via bank cards, state licenses or something like that.

yeah, i'd rather not jump down the 'verification' rabbit hole. it's not worth the issues with censorship, doxxing/blackmail, FURTHER mass surveillance, etc... especially as unable and unwilling many large institutions are to properly secure their data. unless ofc we're talking about DMCA, perpetrators and enablers of false claims should be prosecuted for perjury/fraud as is SUPPOSED to happen. but that's pretty off-topic for here.

[v-fox]

yeah, i'd rather not jump down the 'verification' rabbit hole. it's not worth the issues with censorship, doxxing/blackmail, FURTHER mass surveillance, etc... especially as unable and unwilling many large institutions are to properly secure their data. unless ofc we're talking about DMCA, perpetrators and enablers of false claims should be prosecuted for perjury/fraud as is SUPPOSED to happen. but that's pretty off-topic for here.

That's easily fixed by public-key infrastructure and signature verification messages that would preclude sites from having copies of personal info. Only government office that already handles registration would have personal data and it would be easy to verify authorship of anything. But that would require government not to be a bunch of corporate stooges. As for tracking, sites already give out their registration data for the likes of Google (not just from malice but often from laziness of not wanting to handle their own statistics) to track all doing of every individual to the point of generating behavioural profiles on everyone. I just want this infrastructure to serve for the benefit of public and not against it, as it currently does.

As for "further" censorship and surveillance. There is no "further", there is already massive DNS & DPI packet logging & spoofing everywhere. You may not feel it yet because your government haven't enabled mandatory blacklists for sites yet but even for "freest of the free" all infrastructure is already there. A system that's designed for public convenience would not need those methods and they wouldn't even work in fully E2EE environment, other than identification and verification.

Wouldn't solve the problem of criminalizing political dissent in the first place though. No technical solution would. Supposedly, that's why US has gun rights in its constitution. But guns don't rewrite anti-public laws for you either.

[zwetan]

what does it has to do with the original topic of this thread ?
absolutely nothing

@v-fox you are a troll hijacking this thread

[v-fox]

what does it has to do with the original topic of this thread ?
absolutely nothing

@v-fox you are a troll hijacking this thread

It has to do with preserving Flash media and state of WWW's interactive media creation after Flash's abandonment more than your inane blabbering and pointless defeatist attitude are. And I would suggest to refrain from ad hominems unless you want to get acquainted with opinions about your own character and psychiatric well-being.

But feel free to whine some more about how "everything is pointless" while I'll continue to run my archived Flash content in a fully open OS.

[PippoApps]

We got as far as threatening for psychiatric assessment. Wonderful <3
A s a hot tempered latin I am loving this thread more and more...

[PippoApps]

And I would suggest to refrain from ad hominems unless you want to get acquainted with opinions about your own character and psychiatric well-being.

If you allow me, I am going to steal this sentence in order to use it in other contexts. I love your prose.
Very close to mine in my native language.