Some 9/11 News Coverage is Lost. Blame Adobe Flash (cnn.com) 117
CNN reports that "Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash."
Journalism is often considered the first draft of history, but what happens when that draft is written on a software program that becomes obsolete?
Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their September 11th coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN's online coverage of September 11th also has been impacted by the end of Flash.
That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."
Dan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. As an online producer for the Post's website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared.
"This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business. "I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't."
Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their September 11th coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN's online coverage of September 11th also has been impacted by the end of Flash.
That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."
Dan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. As an online producer for the Post's website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared.
"This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business. "I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't."
This is bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, with all due respect, we probably have enough material as it is.
Re:This is bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
There are plenty of automated flash 2 html5 converters around still [github.com].
Also it's hard for me to believe that much coverage of 9/11 was in Flash. Internet video wasn't popular in those days because most people didn't have bandwidth.
Re:This is bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Also it's hard for me to believe that much coverage of 9/11 was in Flash. Internet video wasn't popular in those days because most people didn't have bandwidth.
It's not about the coverage of the event itself, it's the interactive displays about what and how something happened, or the timeline of events. I remember viewing some of what the professor was talking about.
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It shouldn't be impossible to convert such things to more modern platforms. There just needs to be the will and the expertise.
Re:This is bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Nothing is "lost". It is just currently inaccessible to the average Jane or Joe.
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Some stuff is lost because the sites removed it when Flash died and it isn't included in archives. For example I don't think the Internet Archive was saving Flash content back then, I could be wrong but when I check sites from that era the Flash parts always seem to be missing.
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Then that is to blame on the actual curators. We don't blame microfilm, for example, if all libraries throw out their archives of newspapers on microfilm from 1960-1965 without anyone bothering to convert them to something more modern.
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I'm not sure I can list all the startups I know of that believed they could re-implement an obsolete technology favored by their original founders, especially their CTO. I can't think of any successful ones.
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flash has been very successfully replaced globally by javascript+html, a while ago.
the thing is, the content in question became relevant again only because of anniversary and nostalgia. nobody bothered to keep it up to date with technology for two decades because it didn't interest anyone, and probably won't again for the next decade. as gp points out, this is just a matter of motivation, and there isn't any for this except for writing crap like this laughable "news" article. it's both hilarious and sad.
Re: This is bullshit (Score:2)
You are confused about the purpose of Flash. Yes, in its waning years it was largely used to shoehorn video codecs into browsers that weren't otherwise supporting them. But the real strength of Flash was its original purpose: vector animations. AtomFilms and Homestarrunner were popular in 2001, providing animated video at low bitrates. Lots of illustrations and interactive graphics were done as Flash. And unfortunately many sites were using Flash rather than JS &c for basic navigational elements like me
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I still have some old animations that I run in gnash.
It was pretty good for that, unfortunately most often it was used in place of a website, in concert with javascript. The Bad Old Days of the web.
I never used those stites. I was already using js blockers. I never missed anything. I never regretted not having that content.
For games it was pretty good. And it took years for the youtube html5 player to be as good as the flash player.
And you may not have realized this, but flash can't do site navigation witho
Re: This is bullshit (Score:2)
Most people were on dialup, and every piece of 9/11 footage worth watching was on TV, recorded on VHS or DVRs and can be found on the internet. And there is tons of 9/11 "truther" crap as well.
Really, what is being lost here?
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In 2001? I can attest that many of us had much better connections at our work, in our schools, and in our homes.
Re: This is bullshit (Score:2)
Broadband was just starting to take off in 2001, and most websites were tailored for dial up usage.
Schools and businesses usually had T1 or simaler broadband connections, but most home users were still using dialup.
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Partly because of my line of work and education, I'd had much high quality connections throughout much of the history of the Internet. Note, please, that I didn't say "most had better connections", merely pointed out that for many of us professionally and personally, we did have better access and some viable video and audio feeds.
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Video was not popular, but Flash was very popular. Mostly for things like interactive maps and such. That takes up very little bandwidth and is a useful way to present a lot of information in a small package which works well on low resolution displays.
Nowadays that is almost entirely gone, replaced with video. That makes saving these even more important.
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My memory is that Flash was mainly popular for advertisements.
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For anyone that has need to watch a video on a website that still uses flash video then there is the Lightspark plugin (https://lightspark.github.io/ [github.io]). It has worked for me on the 1 site that I needed to watch something in a flash video player with. Use at own risk of course.
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Except that it is not bullshit. The problem is that previous works that depended on Flash, and are saved and available on-line, once could be viewed by anyone who was interested. Legacy works are not constantly being updated by people because the original creators moved on (or passed on) long ago, and no one is paying money or giving up their free time to make this happen -- if they even can.One is lucky just to have the original works still available at all, that the servers that host them are still runnin
Or a new version (Score:2)
Not exactly lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not as if flv format is rendered unreadable by the obsolescence of Adobe Flash. It can still be converted to more suitable formats by anyone interested enough to dig up that part of internet history. And it is all converted from their TV coverage, which they seem to have no trouble digging up for replays today.
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Flash is not just FLV, and we didn't have FLV in 2001.
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swf is not rendered unreadable by the obsolescence of Adobe Flash, either.
Re: Not exactly lost (Score:2)
It kind of is in fact.
None of the reimplementations of flash player are good enough. They are usually come but do break down, render incorrectly some stuff out outright not render the swf.
And for some incomprehensible reason, the official offline flash projector is worse than those reimplementations.
And even if you can find an old version of flash without the kill switch, you also need an old version of a browser, and tinker with about:config if you even want to load local swf.
It's a pita even for the most
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In Netscape and IE?
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Yeah, I don't remember what the Flash video codec before flv was called though. The story is about video being lost, not shockwave flash animations.
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Sorry, I was making assumptions based on CNN being a video news source in 2001. Re-reading more carefully this time, I see they mention an interactive explainer, so it was swf. Video was not supported in flash until 2002.
missing option (Score:2)
missing option
Maybe they should have used Real Player
More like blame closed standards (Score:3)
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If they embrace open standards, surely they could have opened Flash.
Or published their own Flash to HTML5 converter. The fact they didn't do that seems like a pretty offhand way to to treat their users, some of whom had been churning out Flash stuff for years and years and years.
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They did it to obsolete flash and close off the demand for an unprofitable market.
No (Score:2)
Blame the lazy journalists for not listening to the literal 10 years' worth of warnings that Flash was going away.
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There was no warning that Flash was going away in 2001.
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Yes, there was. Any number of people warned that it was foolish to lock up content inside a proprietary blob, and were thoroughly ignored.
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Thankfully they were ignored, the alternative was, what, RealMedia(TM)?
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*H*T*M*L*
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yes but that's not really fair, html wasn't there yet in 2001, not by a long shot. it excelled eventually, but those were about 10/15 though years for interactive content and browser compatibility, and anything went ;-)
of course burying information you deem valuable into a proprietary format doesn't seem wise ... if there are working alternatives. one strength of the flash player at that time was precisely that in bypassing the browser it was immune to their market-wars and compatibility issues. this ended
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Anything proprietary can go away at any time.
Standard formats from 2001 and even earlier are still accessible today just fine.
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Standard formats in 2001 were flv and rv. Anything else had to be downloaded and played offline.
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How long ago do you think 10 years was?
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It's longer ago every year. Sometimes I look at a calendar and just sit there blinking.
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Not 2001, which is what this entire thread is about.
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At the time, Flash was one of few alternatives for interactive content (e.g. interactive graphs, layered diagrams, or even games). If a website needed it for whatever reason, you either picked flash or one of the other options.
The other options - at least the way they were presented - weren't good either. I recall Java having a few seconds of startup latency that weren't present in Flash (maybe it was faster pre-2000), and JavaScript didn't seem as something as robust as it currently is (most common instr
Nonsense. Just about the entire ... (Score:5, Informative)
... Flash stack is covered by open source tooling, official IDE and player aside. You can basically pic swf and flv apart with the cli. FLV itself is little more than a capsule format. And Adobe animate can read and load fla.
No need to panic. Just get someone with basic computer skills to extract the data.
What did you say, media outlet? Ok, forget that basic computer skills part ...
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You can basically pic swf and flv apart with the cli.
I understand what you wrote, but I had a little chuckle imagining the average journalist trying to make sense of it.
Is silly to blame Adobe Flash (Score:5, Informative)
You can still use adobe flash. while the plug-In itself is unsupported, FireFox ESR 78 (an up to date current browser that will receive security patches until oct 2021) supports the plug-in. In my case, I am using V32. If you are willing to change certain config files and/or registry keys, you can use V34 (the very last one).
So, until early nov 2021, any run of the Jane the plumber user can use OG flash to check 9/11 coverage.
Beyond that, Ruffle is supported in Firefox ESR 91 (and vanilla FireFox too), and since AVM1 has almost full support, any 9/11 news coverage will probably be accesible to Joe 6 pack. That my plan for Flash beyond Nov 2021...
Beyond that, for people like archivists and more specialized roles, the adobe flash debuger is available from adobe for free, and works as a stand alone app (i.e. outside the browser)... So you only need to extract/download the relevant content from the relevant site, and of to the races...
In 2001, Flash was one of the few viable ways to get video content over the web. So... Would it had been better if the coverage was in clay tablets in Cunneiform? Maybe intel indeo?
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Ruffle does not support flash videos at all.
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Ruffle does not support flash videos yet.
There, fixed that for you :-P
Re: Is silly to blame Adobe Flash (Score:2)
You first need to find the og flash player without the kill switch.
Then find a browser that loads it. Possible now, by the end of 2021 it will be harder, you'll need an old build too, and constantly ignore the "update" warning.
On ruffle and al, yes they are good. Far from perfect though, they artifact, don't register inputs, or outright don't work for some flv.
The official offline flash projector / debugger is for some reason worse than ruffle and al. Probably because the official flash plug-in relies on th
Missing in inattention. (Score:2)
Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business.
Myspace [bbc.com] was images and text.
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Myspace [bbc.com] was images and text.
So was most of geocities.
"Have you ever built a home page on geocities... you are mole people, the lowest of the low. I suppose I must love you a great deal, because I made so many of you. But in my eyes you are just millions of insignificant insects." -- The Voice of the Internet, from the soundtrack to the book Netslaves
format is not data (Score:1)
No, it's still there exactly as it was before. Confusing file format with data is like thinking the internet is your browser.
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iHeartRadio has every moment it ever published since the start of WXKS-FM (Kiss 108 Boston) as its first station when it was operating under the name Clear Channel. Format doesn't matter, it can be coded again. There will be quite a display for this, the "Simulcast with the Past" start of the Kiss Classics Channel in 2029.
Part of this is that music radio compresses well... you can mark an entire song as "We played that again!" with a few bits instead of a multi-megabyte 3:23 of an MP3.
VM (Score:4, Insightful)
Adobe Flash still works perfectly under VM.
A much bigger issue is that the majority of the information that was posted on the Internet just 20 years ago is no longer available. And Web Archive only stores so much.
And the same will happen to what we have right now. And the issue is exacerbated even further because at least 20 years ago we still had a lot of print media which is basically gone nowadays. Everything is so fleeting, as if it's never happened. "Digital" and "legacy" just don't vibe together.
Re: VM (Score:4, Insightful)
Why blame adobe? (Score:2)
Unlike paper vs vellum, lots of automated tools exist to convert flash to more standard formats. Contents that is worth preserving would have been converted. So we can definitely blame the skinflint curators who chose not to convert flash to standard formats.
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it's even funnier because the files aren't lost, and Flash can be converted to any other video format trivially. This is much ado about nothing, as in nothing lost and nothing worth getting upset about.
Are slashdotters technically ignorant now?
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Ignorants are the people that believe flash was just a "video format".
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the files in question are Flash Video.
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Blame is irrelevant. The fact is the material is now inaccessible due to the technology required to view it being dropped from tools that normal users have available. (The slash-nerds always amuse me with what they imagine are simple totally satisfactory solutions [slashdot.org].Tech that expires in two months, but if you only edit the registry...).
It doesn't matter whether you view the paper vendor or the monk is "to blame" the work vanishes forever. That is all that matters.
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So we can definitely blame the skinflint curators who chose not to convert flash to standard formats.
Curators themselves are experts on the subject but tend not to have technical expertise. Better curators work with engineers to ensure that their medium is preserved. That's been my job for more than 20 years!
Been true for 6000 years (Score:1)
"Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it"
Why would you think the internet would change this fact?
Credible Archives only go back 5 years! (Score:2)
Slashdot only lets you search the last 5 years worth of stories and comments. Most news sites do the same. Sorry, you can't turn the clocks back 20 years without LexisNexis.
What you'd find if you watched those archives was news at its worst. Wrong team on the field, filed with suddenly introduced correspondents.
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What you'd find if you watched those archives was news at its worst. Wrong team on the field, filed with suddenly introduced correspondents.
News went to hell very quickly after 2000 everything was colossal, huge, stupendous, catastrophic, monstrous, etc, the never ending panic. After the first 5 min of 911 news I had to tune it out, so I took a nap. Since 911 I check the main stream media only about every four days. Its just more endless speculation, fear mongering, and download the app.
Older technologies lost data too (Score:2)
Some older film journalism is lost because nitrate film decayed or caught fire (or both!).
Some written journalism is lost because all copies were printed on cheap, acidic pulp and they corroded themselves to pieces.
Media disappears, or fails. That's why archiving is critical, and our 20th century cultures are very bad at consistent archiving. We hope that because we flood the world with copies of media, some of it will survive.
Hope is not a strategy.
Copying data to new formats and new technology is a strate
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The vast majority of data not digitalized today is probably functionally gone. Events like the 1937 Fox vault fire or stupidities like NASA reusing the Apollo 11 tapes to cause data loss. If it's analog media it comes with imperfect duplication, requires additional space or hardware that is going to become rare over time, and will slowly decay. Most of that media requires some form of specialized equipment. Components like capacitors age, oxide builds up on contacts, plastic gets brittle. There's going to b
Is it really gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can see the Flash files are still there, and there's plenty of software still available that can parse Flash and extract the contents. Just pull the video asset out of the Flash file and, if necessary, convert it to a current audio/video format. That's been done for a long time, take a look at the conversion of newspaper archives from paper copies to microfilm to digital. What's missing is people committed to archiving material in the first place instead of just assuming a copy will be available somewhere, and the recognition that archiving isn't a one-time thing but an ongoing process of insuring the material is kept from decaying in the archive.
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Modern web browsers are rejecting Flash, as outdated and having a horrible clause in its terms of service.
Flash was terrorism (Score:1)
nuf sed
Your saved proprietary file formats aren't forever (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad the media outlets didn't pick on the MS-OOXML vs ODF war which was fought in the halls of the Massachusetts state legislature over a decade ago.
Legislatures were bought off and then the predominant worldwide/international standards organization, ISO, had its membership flooded with Microsoft funded partners and MS OOXML was voted as an international standard and the 'war' was lost. It hardly registered in the media.
Now you have to rent your software from Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe, etc so no longer can you even archive your purchased copies of your software to have access to your corporate IP stored in many of these file formats. Wait another 10 or so years and there'd be another article of a company without access to data and designs it created.
LoB
What's gonna happen when PowerPoint (Score:2)
loses reverse compatibility and you can't properly view old documents in the form of PowerPoint anymore?
Oh wait that happens across every fucking new version of PowerPoint. Geometric objects get their alignment all messed up, fonts change, equations don't work.
For technical work, and communication, it's a shitshow.
and that is why... (Score:2)
"This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business. "I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't."
And that is why anyone with working brain cells never used Flash to build a website. We saw this coming when it was introduced.
It's not the Internet that's rotting. It's the attempts at cutting off and locking away parts of it behind proprietary solutions that are.
Don't do that. Simple as that. Don't use Flash, don't use Silver-whatever Mickeysoft's attempt to copy it badly was named, don't use whatever the next incarnation will be.
20th century hieroglyphics (Score:1)
Building the Rosetta Stone (Score:2)
imagine what itâ(TM)ll be like to decipher 200 years from now when the source code that was used to extract and read Flash is also in a format no longer understood or functioning.
This is what stage0 [github.com] and GNU Mes [gnu.org] aim to prevent, by establishing from first principles a bootstrap sequence for the runtime environment as we know it.
article is rubbish and a lie (Score:2)
None of the files were lost, Flash is easily playable or convertable to any other video format. I see some hear whining about loss of information to time... Turn in your geek card if you can't play a Flash file, you don't belong on slashdot.
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the files in question are Flash video files, pay attention and think before making a moron of yourself next time.
Just a couple or lines of JavaScript (Score:2)
Just copy-and-paste a couple or lines of JavaScript to convert it to WASM using Leaningtechâ(TM)s CheerpX for Flash.
I am not affiliated with them in any way. Just a happy user.
Blame Steve Jobs (Score:2)
Re: Blame Steve Jobs (Score:1)
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Utter Bullshit -- Nothing has been Lost (Score:2)
Many persons, including myself, banished Flash as soon as it was created. Never seen anything in Flash. Flash crap has never been permitted in the same room as any computer for which I am responsible. Ever.
So what? (Score:2)
Seriously, why should anybody care?
I guarantee you there isn't one nugget in any of those lost artifacts that isn't abundantly covered elsewhere. If anything, the reduction of duplication should be applauded.
I feel very stupid asking this but here goes (Score:2)
Why do I keep hearing that stuff is lost due to flash?
Is it literally impossible to run flash things now on an new Windows 7VM (heck or Windows 10?) with a standalone installer of flash? I'm baffled here.
I keep hearing stuff is gone forever or lost. I mean, I know Strongbad is interactive but what about plain video? I don't get it. Did something happen?
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Strongbad was converted to HTML5 fwiw.
"Data Archaeology" has been a thing for a while (Score:2)
That name is mine (not claiming originality), but the idea is general. It requires people that know what they are doing, but it is not that hard. You can basically resurrect any old software in a VM or an emulator. Sure, a run-of-the-mill "IT Professional" will probably not be able to do it, but maybe ask a real IT engineer some time....
Blame the news sites (Score:2)
Flash wasn't disabled overnight. Depracating Flash took years, which was time enough for any news site which actually cared to convert these videos to a format that could be viewed in a modern browser.
So if any news site still has broken Flash pages, that company is to blame. If a new site chooses not to make old news available, and it has to be viewed from the web archive, that's also something for which the new site should be blamed.
Researchers using web archive should be aware that it's necessary to use
Weren't there flash clones? (Score:2)
Could have sworn there were efforts to make drop-in replacements for flash. All you need do, surely, is to use one of those to tender and then recode to a modern format.
But this does demonstrate how digital archives are vulnerable and why proprietary standards are bad.
Real history (Score:2)
"Journalism is often considered the first draft of history, but what happens when that draft is written on a software program that becomes obsolete?"
It becomes real history, 4 Saudis and an Egyptian caused the US to burn 3 trillions in Afghanistan, the greatest success of a commando ever!
blame the people that used Flash (Score:2)
There was no reason to use Flash. You can blame Adobe for turning out a crap product but you really have to blame the people that chose to use that crap tool.
I Have Flash (Score:2)
When Adobe announced the end of Flash -- not in 2001 but much more recently -- I thought that was good. While I had Flash installed, I long ago set my browser to disable it. Then, after the last version self-destructed, I discovered that a silly game I like (Planetary) would no longer work. From my own archives, I pulled the installer file for Flash 32.0.0.344, which appears to be the last version that does not self-destruct. I installed it but still set my browser to disable it. I enable it only when
So? (Score:2)
This is a problem with all electronic media. The problem with flash is minor compared to data stored on old tapes or floppy disks, or really old word processing or publishing formats.
I guess it's a mixed blessing AOL ARTDoc failed (Score:2)
I guess it's a mixed blessing AOL ARTDoc failed. This was a streaming content platform that merged audio with line art and graphics compressed with a new version of Johnson-Grace ART compression.
After AOL's slow implosion it's hard to grasp how much content would have been lost if that format became popular during AOL's ownership of media giant Time-Warner.
At least with Adobe Flash and Shockwave you could just install it on an old computer or virtual machine.
Also Blame cassette tape, VHS, paper, film... (Score:2)
If you put the the old record into backyard and ignore them, the physical media will deterioate, and digital media format will expire.
The "simple" workaround is to periodically renew the old media, but very few people will do this.
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1 : get the bad man ( Ie bin landen)
2: deflect attention from what ever the current scandal , of the day was
3: distract as many people as possible until at least after the next cycle of elections
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The United States did not invade Afghanistan because of 9/11. The United States invaded Iraq because of 9/11 (in theory, but really it was just because the little shrub needed something to stroke his little soft-on).
The United States invaded Afghanistan because they had a "partnership deal" with the Russians for a pipeline across part of Afghanistan, and the Afghans were not co-operating. First the Russians invaded, then the United States. Neither of them were successful in occupying the country and oper
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Oddly there's nothing in this story [newyorker.com] from people who should know about a pipeline. Either Russian or US, let along Afghan. Now if you had said Opium you'd be closer to some kind of truth.
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It is the children -- the direct result of the invasion of the great unwashed...