adobe flash 0-day

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> writes:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 09:25:25 -0700,
>   "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" <wolfgang.rupprecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> If flash is now very unsafe, is there a working alternative yet?  Is
>
> Adobe's flash player has been unsafe for a very long time and I don't expect
> that to change anytime soon.

Yea.  This latest f-up finally drove the point home for me.  It was time
to bite the bullet and do an "rm $(locate libflashplayer.so)" and not
look back.

> There are a few open source flash players available. They seem to be buggy
> and don't support the latest version of flash very well. Also for Fedora,
> h264 is patented and prevents support of that codec (commonly used in
> flash) in the distro. Though people in some areas of the world can use
> the codec support from RPMFusion.

I do recall using mplayer to play youtube *.flv videos at one point but
it was a real pain in the neck to dig the obfusciated video url out of
the javascript in order to download the *.flv file.  

I'm hoping that there already is some flash plugin that can spawn a
safer external player to play the videos.  From a security standpoint I
imagine an external player should be quite a bit safer since it can be
sandboxed with a powerless UID and/or selinux to have just enough
permission to open a window and read the one video file.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht      http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/      (IPv6-only)