Adobe Flash results: Trains stop in a Chinese city

In the fast-moving world of utility software, one must always keep an eye on the product life of the tools one uses, otherwise one component may stop working (end of life, EOL) thus ruining the whole process. At least that’s what happened to a railway company in northern China: it uses Adobe Flash to manage its train operations, which recently shut down its service. Conclusion: All trains were stationary for a day.

No train traffic for 20 hours

Manufacturer Adobe has announced the end of the once popular multimedia programming site Flash 2017, finally turning the turn of 2020/21 into an irreversible end of customer service. Without the update, the manufacturer also found the tool too intimidating, and he ordered that Flash not run any content from January 12, 2021. A railway company in the northern Chinese port city of Dalian was caught unprepared for this initial run, so it happened last Tuesday – 12.1 said. – Out of the flash based software service for controlling train operations. Throughout the city, all train traffic was halted for about 20 hours Hong Kong News Website Apple Daily Announced.

According to the report, the Chinese Railway Shenyang team in Dalian (Liaoning Province) did not deactivate Flash components in its software. This led to the position of all track systems, where staff could no longer see the operating maps of the trains, could not determine the train order and could not make any plans.

In the early days of the Internet, Flash played a significant role in multimedia content in the browser (infamous Flash Player), but for a long time it was considered superfluous and outdated and – above all – very insecure: software was innumerable and coded for various malicious codes of all degrees of severity. Reefs. It is no exaggeration to say that the widespread use of Flash Player at one time was inversely proportional to the reputation of the software from a security standpoint.

The most important browsers have long outsourced or disabled Flash Player (most recently Google in the Chrome browser), and Apple denied him access to the iOS mobile device operating system altogether. Outside of alternative player software and browser, Flash content can still be used.

Issue fixed: Older version installed

Incidentally, the staff at Dalian solved their problem with a tried and tested trick: they installed an older version of Flash Player, which was not locked on January 12, 2021. Trains have been running there ever since. The confusion in a forum in Kitub is somewhat understandable (here is one Automatic translation into English Google Translate).

(tiw)