Disabling Flash paralyzes Chinese railway for a day



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Passengers pulling a baggage ring from a concrete terminal squat
Enlarge / Dalian Station.

In 2017, Adobe announced that it would turn off Flash at the end of 2020. Earlier this month, on January 12, Adobe fulfilled its plans, turning off Flash installations around the world. One result, according to Apple Daily, has been chaos at a Chinese railroad in Liaoning Province.

China Railway Shenyang officials use Flash-based software to plan daily railway operations. As a result of the outage, according to Apple Daily, “staff members would have been unable to view train operating patterns, formulate train sequencing schedules and organize shunting plans.”

As a result, the railroad was unable to ship its trains, “leading to a complete shutdown of its railways in Dalian, Liaoning Province,” according to Apple Daily.

After a day of chaos, the Railroad found a solution: it got a hacked version of Flash without the self-deactivating code. The railway installed it early in the morning of January 13, allowing operations to resume.

Officials gave a gripping account of the incident in an article on Chinese social media account QQ.

“After more than 20 hours of fighting, no one complained and no one gave up,” they wrote (according to Google Translate). “Even though there is little hope, there is motivation to move forward.”

The post sparked some mockery on the Chinese internet, with observers pointing out that railway officials could have anticipated this problem and developed a non-Flash dispatch system months earlier. The post has been deleted, but a copy is still available at archive.org.

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