Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, set off the alarm bells this summer.
After hackers revealed two previously undisclosed and critical security vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash—software that drives videos, games, animations, and ads across the Internet—Stamos called on Adobe and the makers of the world's web browsers to at least set a date for the death of this insecure, inefficient, much maligned, yet still widely used piece of software. Adobe has not done so. But Flash's demise is drawing nearer.
About two weeks ago, Porn.com, one of the Internet's larger free porn video sites, switched from a Flash-based web video player to a player that uses HTML5, a newer means of displaying web content established by the consortium that oversees the design of the web. Porn.com's various free video services receive about 15 million visits a day, according to the company behind it. And now, practically all of those visitors will use HTML5 rather than Flash, says Porn.com vice president Phil Bradbury and two of the engineers who helped build the new player.
Considering the undying trope that porn video accounts for some astronomical portion of all Internet traffic, this decision is at least a symbolically important step towards the death of Flash. As fast as the Internet evolves, this worldwide computer network is still painfully slow to change in some ways. But one of its more widely discussed flaws is at least moving closer to extinction.
Phone and tablet makers like Apple and Google have already pushed Flash off of mobile devices (for the most part). Big Internet operations like Google's YouTube and Facebook now play most almost all of their desktop and laptop video with HTML5 rather than Flash. And Google recently moved to restrict ads that use Flash. Now, the porn industry—which does command a sizable of Internet traffic, though not necessarily as large as its reputation would have it—is going the same way.
According to Bradley and the engineers who worked on the project, Porn.com's switch to HTML5 was motivated in part by this summer's events, when Google and Mozilla are temporarily blocked Flash in their popular web browsers, Chrome and Firefox. Porn.com will continue to use Flash on extremely old and rarely used web browsers, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. But for the most part, it will use the same HTML player across desktops, laptops, mobile devices, PlayStations, Xboxes, and more. "We can provide the same look and feel across every device," says one of the engineers who built the player, who did not provide their full names, presumably because they are wary of being attached to work in the adult industry.
The move is particularly notable, says Chris O'Connell, the chief architect of Mikandi, the world's largest porn app store, because another persistent trope is that the adult sites are particularly susceptible to viruses and malware. "They aren't necessarily a more likely vector for attack, but people believe that they are," he says. Flash is one of the main avenues of attack on a web browser, and in discarding it, Porn.com has made itself more secure, at least in theory.
"Every piece of software has vulnerabilities. But the main mode of attack now is the browser and plugins within that browser," says Jérôme Segura, a senior researcher with security outfit Malwarebytes. "The past couple of years, that's been all about Flash."
Flash was one of the fundamental technologies that underpinned the rise of the web from the late `90s and across the next decade. Eradicating the technology will still require some time. It still sits in hundreds of millions of web browsers and is widely used to deliver ads. Google and Facebook still use it as a backup. And though Porn.com has jettisoned the technology, others in the adult industry continue to use it. Pornhub, which may run the largest free video porn operation on the 'net, with more than 100 million visits a day, still use Flash on "some platforms," according to company spokesman. But progress is at hand. Even if you're watching porn.
