Adobe announced in February that it’s planning to end the life of Flash by 2020, due to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly maturing; taking over the capabilities and functionalities that its plugins pioneer.

Despite Adobe’s deadline, it appears that less than 5% of worldwide websites are still using Flash, as most websites favour Javascript for running features instead.

A recent study found that last year, less than 7% of websites use Flash, although, back in 2011, 28.5% of websites were using the tech.

Adobe wrote in a blog post: “Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash.

Animation and video tools

“Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

“Adobe will remain at the forefront of leading the development of new web standards and actively participate in their advancement. This includes continuing to contribute to the HTML5 standard and participating in the WebAssembly Community Group.

“And we’ll continue to provide best in class animation and video tools such as Animate CC, the premier web animation tool for developing HTML5 content, and Premiere Pro CC.”

The post Developers leave Adobe Flash before its 2020 finish date appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Google’s extension, Copyfish, was hijacked and compromised by unknown attackers who have supplied it with “advertisement injection capabilities”.

The Chrome Web Store account of German developer team, a9t9 software, was recently attacked after a team member received phishing emails identical to the Chrome Web Store teams, asking to update Chrome’s Copyfish extension; to push spam and advertisements to its users.

Copyfish has over 37,5000 users, allowing them to withdraw text from images, videos and PDF files.

The attackers then prevented developers from removing the infected extension to its developer account, providing a bit.ly link.

Developers announced that the password screen looked identical to that of Google, although the team did not have proof of its fake password page because of it only appearing once.

According to Hacker News, developers warned: “So far, the update looks like a standard adware hack, but, as we still have no control over Copyfish, the thieves might update the extension another time… until we get it back.

“We can not even disable it — it is no longer in our developer account.”

Users are advised not to install the malicious Chrome extension and delete it if they already have it installed.

Google developer support is also working to provide a9t9 with access to its software.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Google Chrome extension attacked appeared first on DevOps Online North America.