I’ve got to be honest and say we’ve never run a Flash based mobile ad, so part of me is thinking that this isn’t going to affect us that much, however, it does mean those developers who were developing products across all three platforms now only have to worry about two. This, we can only hope equates to better time-to-market, reduced testing times and hopefully less complex development cycles.

Importantly it now signifies to us where we need to focus our product attention on development. So, the question is, do you have the requisite skills in your team (and personally) to support these technologies? If you don’t are there others in your wider organisation who do and if they’re not there either how will you ensure you meet these future requirements & needs of your advertisers & agencies?

CNet have a video article covering the news:

Here’s some stories (apologies if some of them are a bit sycophantic about Apple).
Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flash-mobile-dead
LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/adobe-to-end-mobile-flash-plug-in-development.html

Joshua Hirsch, Big Spaceship
Marc Jensen, Space150
Ricardo Cabello, Freelancer
Aaron McGuire, Evolution Bureau
Markus Persson, Mojang AB
Evan Stark, Domani Studios
Scott Prindle, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
John Mayo-Smith, R/GA
Dave Riegler, TBWA\Chiat\Day
Keith Butters, The Barbarian Group

Link: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/top-10-technologists-135797.

To say that this site ticks a hole swathe of ‘to do’ boxes on my development list is to do it a dis-service. If you re involved in ensuring the Quality Assurance of ads appearing on your site then pop along and apply up for an account. Briefly though their service supports some of the more obscure aspects of QAing your ads such as:

• File type
• size
• dimensions
• flash version
• fps
• Real click testing
• CPU benchmarking
• HTTP monitoring
• Audio detection

Once I’ve had a chance to spend a bit more time playing with this I’ll post up some more information and perhaps some ideas for extending their service based on some of the issue I’ve faced over the past 11 years, but for time being I’m hopeful of finding a site that fulfills some difficult to measure and hard centralise QA tasks.

“SWFTools is a collection of code for handling Flash .SWF-files. This includes a
merging tool (swfcombine), an extracting tool (swfextract),
PDF/JPEG/PNG/AVI/TTF/WAV to SWF converters (pdf2swf, jpeg2swf, png2swf, avi2swf,
font2swf, and wav2swf), a text parsing tool (swfstrings), an SWF parser
(swfdump), and a library for writing and reading SWFs (rfxswflib).”

http://freshmeat.net/projects/swftools#release_317771

Mike Chambers has an additional piece as well from his own testing:
Relative Performance of Rich Media Content across Browsers and Operating Systems (does not ‘perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows’).
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/03/01/relative-performance-of-rich-media-content-across-browsers-and-operating-systems/

This is a bit of an old article, sorry but it managed to not get published when it was supposed to.

In the past we used, and still do, tools such as Sothink SWF Decompiler and URLActionEditor to analyse flash files and amend them accordingly. But enter OneVision wo’ve been busy in the intervening years and by all accounts have built out a fully-featured pre-flighting tool called Contenio for use by online AdOps departments to check and authorise creatives as they come into the department. I haven’t yet seen the product working but I’m hopeful it will address some of the ore recurrent themes such as checking for clickTag() case sensitivity/spelling, fix _root. issues, check for embedded urls, check for target=”_blank” etc, but hopefully we’ll get to see this in action soon and report back our findings.

For those of you trying to automate out your QA process this could be of vital interest. I look forward to speaking to someone who’s currently or planning on working with this soon.

Original article here: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=1424&tag=nl.e101

This on the back of this report:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/mass_flash_file_vulnerability/ and http://websecurity.com.ua/3789/

My personal take on this is that yes, it could be used as a potential XSS but invariabaly it would have meant that the original 3rd party adserver had been compromised anyway… which is a much more serious issue, eg;

OpenX Ad Server reported to be hacked [2009-12]
Hackers hit OpenX ad server in Adobe attack [2009-12]
eWeek Web Site Leads Users to Rogue Anti-Virus (AV) Application [2009-02]
Details of hijacked 24/7 ad server emerge [2007-10]
Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware to a Million [2006-07]
Bofra exploit hits our ad serving supplier [2004-11]

It’s full list of threat predictions include:
McAfee Labs foresees an increase in threats related to social networking sites, banking security, and botnets, as well as attacks targeting users, businesses, and applications. However, in 2010 we expect to see an increase in the effectiveness of law enforcement to ight back against cybercrime.

• Social networking sites such as Facebook will face more sophisticated threats as the number of users grows.
• The explosion of applications on Facebook and other services will be an ideal vector for cybercriminals, who will take advantage of friends trusting friends to click links they might otherwise treat cautiously.
• HTML 5 will blur the line between desktop and online applications. This, along with the release of Google Chrome OS, will create another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users.
• Email attachments have delivered malware for years, yet the increasing number of attacks targeted at corporations, journalists, and individual users often fool them into downloading Trojans and other malware.
• Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot.
• Banking Trojans will become more clever, sometimes interrupting a legitimate transaction to make an unauthorized withdrawal.
• Botnets are the leading infrastructure for cybercriminals, used for actions from spamming to identity theft. Recent successes in shutting down botnets will force their controllers to switch to alternate, less vulnerable methods of command, including peer-to-peer setups.

PDF report here: http://mcafee.com/us/local_content/white_papers/7985rpt_labs_threat_predict_1209_v2.pdf

Related Slashdot Article: http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/12/29/1435259/Adobe-Flash-To-Be-Top-Hacker-Target-In-2010?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Slashdot/slashdot+(Slashdot)
Anothe realated article: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh010410-story09.html