Comments on: Adobe’s Untapped Goldmine

By: kevin

kevin — Mon, 01 May 2006 20:44:02 +0000

Man, great idea but the first thing that pops into my mind is HUGE security risk no matter what platform you are on. Josh is right in that Macromedia has gone out of their way to ensure a safe environment while using flash, but it does get in the way sometimes. That being said I have found ways around every obsticle that I have encountered, I do that by using other languages to do the work that flash cannot.

Now, back to the question at hand… I would have flash install a copy of ClamAv on all computers. Or a root-kit for osx… hehe, we could only wish.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:34:05 +0000

This would definitely be cool. However, I’m sure the reason Macromedia didn’t allow other people to make use of this functionality is for the same reasons that they have such heavy security on any sort of socket-like connections. I think they’re scared of Flash becoming a security risk like ActiveX in IE.

I don’t doubt that if this functionality were opened up to anyone, we’ll be seeing extra security dialogs with messages like, ‘Are you sure you want to install this software?’ Of course, Flash has tighter security than ActiveX, and it can’t access the system in the same ways. Personally, I think it would be a cool new realm for Flash, but I worry that it will be branded a risk.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:19:16 +0000

p0rn! Or an ultimate spam bot trojan! What else? ;)

wonder if you could rewrite the ‘hosts’ file on the client system so that ‘macromedia.com’ points to your IP, do the install, and then clean up that host entry? hmmm.