Supporting everything, from browser games to live streaming, Adobe Flash was not the Internet’s favorite multimedia platform for no reason. Even in its heyday, however, Flash was not universally loved; it had security holes, could be difficult to optimize and would not play ball with all browsers, especially not on mobile devices. When HTML5 appeared on the scene, Flash fell into disfavor, and in July 2017, Adobe announced that it would discontinue support by the end of 2020, giving users three and a half years to switch to new software. However, this message does not reach all corners of the IT world, and when Flash’s time bomb “code went off on January 12, it did more than make it harder to revisit nostalgic browser games: it has an entire Chinese railroad after a standstill.
According to a report by Apple Daily, the problem stuck its head out to China Railway Shenyang in Dalian, Liaoning on Tuesday, January 12, just after 8 p.m. According to a timeline outlined by Github, the head of a switching station reported that he did not have access to the railway lines, which they usually did through a browser-based Flash interface. Over the next half hour, reports of similar failures flooded in from across the network, with as many as 30 stations reported by a Chinese blog, according to a statement from CR Shenyang.
Only after technicians investigated bug fixes online did officials learn of the worldwide shutdown of Flash, the news of which apparently did not penetrate the Chinese insular internet. A translation of the Github timeline suggests that the software backup temporarily restored the service by noon, although the interruptions returned again around 2pm and later in the evening. CR Shenyang’s response team has reportedly begun investigating a reversal to older software systems, the options of which appear to consist of an unspecified Microsoft-based setup, or an archived, pirated version of Flash without the ‘time bomb’ code. Technicians decided on the latter, and around 1 a.m. on the 13th, CR Shenyang successfully brought one of its stations fully online. At 02:30 all but one were back in use and the railway’s Y2K21 nightmare behind it.
Adobe would certainly not be happy to hear that its deviation would be plundered in pirated form, although it would take the best time to take legal action against CR Shenyang. Copyright laws in China, as Captain Barbossa would say, are treated more like what you would call guidelines as real rules.
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h / t Jalopnik