About the 16 Months Flash Crash Bug

Recently, reports of an old bug in the Flash Player surfaced again. Claiming this bug, that enabled a developer to crash the player, were already reported 16 months ago and still hasn’t been fixed. I remember this bug from when it first surfaced and was surprised that it wasn’t fixed yet.

I had also written about 2 reproducible ways to crash the player, both were fixed by Adobe since then. I don’t remember how fast the fixes were issued but I guess it was on the next dot version.

This is definitely bad, a developer shouldn’t be able to crash the player. But, lets put this into proportion, this isn’t the crashes Steve Jobs is talking about. It unlikely that you stumbled upon this crash and if you did it wasn’t by accident, someone was messing with your player. Again, no one should have the option to crash our player/browser while we browse the web. But, It’s unlikely that this bug, which require some specific and uncommon ways from Flash to interact with the server was ever involved.

Guy A

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