On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone.

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Sometime last year Fabio asked this question on his blog:
“Every day on the web new video related sites appear. Video sharing, video delivery sites or simply mashups, all Flash Video based. I’m very happy about this but there is a thing I can’t understand and it is : why very often is video.smoothing property not used ? This is completely obscure to me because in my opinion a smoothed video is always better than a blocky one.”

Of course he’s right, video.smoothing is simple yet effective, once turned on your video will look a lot better.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Seth Schoen has posted an article on the upcoming - as he calls it - DRM features of Flash Media Server 3.

Make of DRM as a technology what you like but I think the author has missed the point here, or does not understand the purpose of RTMPE, the new encrypted flavor of Adobe’s Real Time Messaging Protocol. FMS3 doesn’t actually apply any kind of DRM to the video content itself, it merely secures the transmission and thereby circumvents content from being intercepted in transit, a process that’s similar to the way that your credit card information is being transmitted to a payment provider when you buy things online - anyone listening in on that transmission will see just garbage that would take years to decrypt.

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If you haven’t heard of the JW FLV Media Player yet then you must have been offline for the last year or two. It is is without doubt the most widely used Flash Video player on the net and best of all it’s open source and free to use for non commercial projects. A Creative Commons License starts at a mere 20 Euros.

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Flashgoddess.com is revving up their 2nd Annual FlashGoddess Contest. If you are a Flash developer, designer, animator and member of the fairer sex now is the time to receive your accolades.

The 21st century woman continues to break gender barriers in male dominated fields: most recently in the technological sciences. We’ve got more ladies in internet technology, web development and computer sciences now more than ever. We’ve even got some playing video games. All of which are steps in the right direction for a bright and better tomorrow.

Flashgoddess.com provides a public forum for damsel developers to show off some mad skillin’. So to encourage prolific creativity amongst Flash females, the prize winner will not only receive the title of Flash Goddess, but also a plethora of goodies that consist of the following:

-Promotion and profile on Flashgoddess.com
-Promotion and profile on FITC.ca

-A Ticket to the FITC Toronto 2008 Festival on April 20-22, 2008
-Award and recognition at the 2008 FITC Design & Technology Awards
-$500 worth of FlashDen files

{ Stock Flash, Audio, Video and Pixel Fonts }
-A copy of Flair (valued at $299) courtesy of Wildform

-Other prizing to follow

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10 runner up prizes of FITC festival tickets

Applicants have until March 15th, 2008 to submit their masterpiece.

Isn’t it a perfect day to read another lambast of the Flash Player for Security Issues?

Security firms and Interested Institutes keep stumbling on security issues and vulnerabilities almost every waking hour of the day. Very recently, Google Researchers documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash SWFs. Another Flash related security issues surfaced about a week ago that the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) interface of your Router may be highly vulnerable to use by hackers seeking to modify their settings — such as choice of DNS Server — from an external location using Flash.

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Adobe have today released Flash Media Server 3.

The server now ships in two editions, the Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3 (FMSS) is ideal if all you want to do is serve up live or on demand video while the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3 (FMIS) gives you access to all features including video recording, server side Shared Objects and more.

FMSS retails at USD $995 while FMIS will set you back USD $4500.

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Click on a single malicious Flash file, and you risk losing control of your router, according to two researchers.  GNUCitizen.org’s Petko D. Petkov and Adrian Pastor judge the issue to be “HIGHLY SEVERE!”

 So let’s take a step back to examine the issue itself.  Between two articles, Petkov and Pastor spent about 2,300 words writing about it, and if you want to fully understand the matter, we’d recommend reading them all.

But, if the what-it-is-and-how-to-fix-it version will satisfy you, Robert McMillan summarizes, “By tricking a victim into viewing a malicious Flash file, an attacker could use UPnP to change the primary DNS (Domain Name System) server used by the router to find other computers on the Internet.  This would give the attacker a virtually undetectable way to redirect the victim to fake Web sites.”

McMillan later continues, “The attack is particularly worrisome because it is cross-platform – any operating system that supports Flash is susceptible – and because it is based on features of UPnP and Flash, not bugs that could be easily fixed by Adobe or the router vendors.”

Here’s the good news, though: as far as anyone knows, it’s just the two researchers who know anything about this method of attack.  Also – although may be side effects from doing this – Petkov and Pastor give instructions on how to turn UPnP off, and say that doing so should effectively prevent the attack.

 It’s rare that we see security researchers use bold, all-capital letters in combination with exclamation marks.  You might consider that while thinking through the issue.

I thought Flash Bashing, these days, was done only by the Internet’s semi-literates! Coming from a respectable person like James Gosling, the creator of Java is rather uncalled for. Nonetheless, it is understandable since his work somewhat relates him to JavaFX (supposedly, a competitor to the client side apps of the Flash Platform). He has all the right to be on the defensive (rather abusive) perspective towards their extremely successful competitor - Flash.

Redmond Developer News published an interview with Sun Microsystems’ James Gosling, in which they discussed JavaFX and its competition in the RIA space. Gosling shared some pointed thoughts on how he believes JavaFX compares to the Flash / Flex platform.James said, “If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff — richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs — it really falls short.”

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O’Reilly Digital Media just released an article from Colin Moock titled “ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not?“.

Here is a warning: This article is best suited for ActionScript Beginners.

I regularly hear people claim, incorrectly, that to use ActionScript 3.0, you have to know object-oriented programming, or every variable’s datatype must be declared, or everything has to be in packages and classes. In practice, none of those assertions are true. ActionScript 3.0 code can be placed on timelines, exactly as it was in ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 1.0. The code doesn’t have to reside in classes. Variable datatypes don’t have to be declared, even in the strict compilation mode. The language is designed to provide as much or as little structure and flexibility as the task at hand requires. If you prefer to program procedurally with functions and variables declared in frame scripts, you can continue to do so in ActionScript 3.0.

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