Comments on: Weird Stuff

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:13:20 +0000

Chrome on Windows is dealing with this much more elegantly than Firefox. It seems that Flash is finally enforcing parameter rules for its ‘Actionscript’ and people haven’t been real careful in writing them. Lots of mistyped and missing parameters being reported. That Bag News ad at Digby’s is a real mess, as are the Comcast ads.

This too will pass, although it is more like kidney stones than gas at this point… 😈

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:25:10 +0000

Mac OS Chrome’s Flash plugin is at 11.3.300.257 but I haven’t seen any Flash strangeness, other than its usual annoying feature of sucking up more memory than Microsoft Office.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 03:20:39 +0000

In reply to Steve Bates.

It looks like it is a combination of Flash and those creating Flash content. I had Flash crash tonight after it complained bitterly about syntax errors and security breaches in something on Digby’s place. I’m guessing that people have been writing code based on ‘undocumented features’, and when Flash was patched, the ‘features’ went away.

We have both seen that multiple times over the years. One coder’s feature is another coder’s exploit point.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 01:40:54 +0000

AdBlock+ may be preventing some (not all) Flash crash events, but I spend a lot of time (dozens of seconds sometime) waiting while AdBlock+ examines its shoelaces. This could be a Flash problem too, I suppose. I’m a little reluctant to turn off AdBlock+ altogether, because until a couple weeks ago, it worked flawlessly without a hiccup. At this point, Flash is more suspect… and there’s really no substitute for it.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:01:16 +0000

I know what you mean, I had to do some looking to find other references to the problem.

Now, instead of crashing, Flash is throwing up debug information for the lousy ad scripts rife on blogs. One PITA after another…

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:34:19 +0000

i’ve been seeing the sitemeter popup too. glad to know it’s not just my computer.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:53:00 +0000

Yeah, Steve, Linux updates always lag behind Win, but they are less frequent as there are fewer security issues. I have noticed since the update that Flash is complaining about the conduct of ad servers violating the ‘sandbox’ rules, and that may be the root cause of the crashes I was seeing before and the Comcast ad problem that was annoying a few days ago. Adblock+ may have been preventing you from having the problem by not loading the badly programmed code.

It was weird, Ellroon, and I scanned it for malware, but it is coming from Site Meter, and it is not supposed to happen unless you visit their site to play with the stats.

By: ellroon

ellroon — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:00:36 +0000

Nice to have the weird Site Meter window explained. I was looking for aliens….

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:30:22 +0000

Apparently the Chrome/Linux current version of Flash is behind the curve… there does not appear to be a .262 version yet; .236 is the current. Chrome’s Flash player is built-in (so says Adobe) and when it changes, that should trigger an update of Chrome itself. On the whole, .236 seems to work OK, as long as AdBlock+ doesn’t get in the way… occasionally I have to disable AdBlock+ on a particular site to see ANY video… not just an ad video. YMMV if you’re not using Linux and Chrome.