Linked List: August 19, 2015

Wednesday, 19 August 2015

Game Developers Wring Their Hands Regarding the Long Slow Death of Adobe Flash 

Patrick Klepek, writing for Kotaku last month:

Basically, people want to kill Flash on the web. Before he died, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously wrote an open letter to Adobe about why the iPhone wouldn’t support Flash. He spent hundreds of words explaining his reasoning, but here’s the summary: Flash totally sucks.

“Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Jobs was mostly right. But while Flash might suck, that doesn’t mean it’s not vital or important.

Jobs wasn’t “mostly” right. He was totally and completely right about Flash.

“Steve Jobs and his ‘reality distortion field’ was probably the worst thing to happen to Flash,” said Newgrounds co-founder Tom Fulp. “There were valid concerns about the security of Flash but the reality was that Steve had an ax to grind with Adobe ever since they didn’t have his back when he returned as the head of Apple. […] But he was a dick, so that’s how it goes.”

This is just delusional. People who see themselves as being tied to Flash — either because they’re Flash developers or because they run websites that heavily rely upon it — are kidding themselves if they think Flash’s demise is the result of some sort of personal, petty vendetta on the part of Steve Jobs.

Flash’s decline was mostly certainly precipitated by iOS’s extraordinary popularity and Apple’s steadfast refusal to support it, but Apple’s opposition to Flash was first and foremost on technical grounds — terrible security, terrible performance.

How Is the Apple Watch Doing? 

Ben Evans:

But luxuries are good. If we only bought things that we need, and that have clear use cases, then we’d all wear nothing but overalls and have a single bare lightbulb in each room of our homes.

This is also the source of the confusion, I think. Reading the Watch’s launch reviews, I sometimes got the sense that the tech press was writing about it as though the luxury goods industry didn’t exist and that the luxury press was writing as though technology didn’t exist: no-one spends money on things because they’re just nice and no-one buys things that don’t last forever. The gold version brought this out best - a tech product that’s $10,000 but has the same spec as the $350 one - heresy! And a gold watch that probably doesn’t last a lifetime - again, heresy! But all rules can be broken with the right product - that’s how progress happens. Meanwhile, the irony is that it’s not actually the gold that’s the luxury but the software - that tap on the wrist telling you to turn left. In a sense, the gold case is an accessory to the software in the same way that the strap is an accessory to the watch.

Perfectly said.

Ashley Madison Account Data Released by Hackers 

Brian Krebs:

Many news sites and blogs are reporting that the data stolen last month from 37 million users of AshleyMadison.com — a site that facilitates cheating and extramarital affairs — has finally been posted online for the world to see. In the past 48 hours, several huge dumps of data claiming to be the actual AshleyMadison database have turned up online. […]

I’ve now spoken with three vouched sources who all have reported finding their information and last four digits of their credit card numbers in the leaked database.

John Herrman, writing for The Awl:

We associate the cost of hacks mostly with identity theft and financial loss, from which most victims are pretty well insulated. Target assessed the cost of that hack at $148 million; outside financial institutions added another $200 million to that figure. You may know someone affected by that hack, but the resulting damages were likely mostly absorbed by their bank or credit card company. It was unsettling, yes, but it wasn’t widely ruinous.

This, on the other hand, is basically unprecedented? Most leaks of this size don’t implicate people in anything aside from patronizing major companies. This is new territory in terms of personal cost. The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible — likely? — that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.

This feels like the plot from a movie — it’s hard to imagine a large scale hack that would create more schadenfreude than this.