Adobe Flash became the latest internet technology to reach end-of-life on 31st December, 2020, and has a built-in kill switch on 12th January, 2021. From Adobe’s announcement:

Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.

Flash was used in the early days of the internet to provide interactive graphics and applications, and later as a mechanism for distributing ads, viruses, and malware, but its popularity for writing games gave it the biggest use case on the internet over the last couple of decades, in part because its vector graphics format made creating portable games easy, without having to worry about whatever the latest incompatible graphics drivers were for various operating systems. It also reached popularity by being able to play MPEG4 and H264 videos in a portable way without being constrained by the browser’s own expected video formats.

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