Adobe Flash Shutdown Shuts Down Chinese Railroad For More Than 16 Hours Before Pirated Copy Restores Operations



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Supporting everything from browser games to live streaming, Adobe Flash wasn’t the Internet’s favorite media platform for no reason. Even at its peak, The Flash was not universally loved; it had security flaws, could be difficult to optimize, and wouldn’t play ball with all browsers, especially those on mobile devices. When HTML5 entered the scene, Flash started to fall out of favor, and in July 2017 Adobe announced it would stop supporting in late 2020, giving users three and a half years to upgrade to new software. However, this message did not reach all corners of the computer world and when the code for Flash’s “time bomb” was unleashed on January 12, it did more than just make nostalgic browser games harder to get hold of. revisit: he brought a whole Chinese railroad to a stop.

According to a report by Apple Daily, the problem surfaced for China Railway Shenyang in Dalian, Liaoning just after 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 12. According to the schedule of the event described by Github, the head of a switching station said they did not have access to the railway timetables, which they normally did through a browser-based Flash interface. Over the next half hour, reports of similar outages poured in from all over the network, with up to 30 stations involved, according to a statement from CR Shenyang reported by a Chinese blog.

It was only after technicians got online to search for bug fixes that officials learned of the global shutdown of Flash, the news of which apparently has not made its way onto the Chinese island internet. A translation of the Github timeline suggests restoring the temporarily restored software backups to the service around noon, although the outages returned around 2:00 p.m. and later that evening. CR Shenyang’s response team then reportedly began exploring a reversion to older software systems, its options apparently consisting of an unspecified Microsoft-based configuration, or an archived and pirated version of Flash without the code for ” time bomb”. The technicians opted for the latter, and around 1:00 am on the 13th, CR Shenyang managed to bring one of its stations online. By 2:30 a.m. all but one of the routes were back in service and the railroad nightmare for the year 2000 was behind.

Adobe surely won’t be happy to hear that its abandonware will spread in a hacked form, even if it would have the longest time to file a lawsuit against CR Shenyang. Copyright laws in China, as Captain Barbossa would say, are treated more as what you call guidelines rather than actual rules.

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h / t Jalopnik

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