Refering to security concerns, Sen. Ron Wyden is encouraging the administration to make an arrangement to ban Adobe Flash before the vendor stops supporting it in 2020.
With that in mind, the Oregon Democrat conveyed a formal demand to the National Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to order a restriction on Flash, by means of an open letter sent Wednesday (PDF) to the government organizations.
“Flash is widely acknowledged by technical experts to be plagued by serious, largely unfixable cybersecurity issues that could allow attackers to completely take control of a vistor’s computer, reaching deep into their digital life,” Wyden wrote.
In 2020, in a joint effort with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, Adobe will resign the much defamed Flash Player. Open models, for example, HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly will replace Flash after it is stopped being used and supported, and Adobe will never again give security updates. Wyden called attention to that that the legislature has “too often failed to promptly transition away from software that has been decommissioned.”
In particular, Windows XP is one case of an absence of modernization at the government level: According to the representative, the U.S. government has burned through “a huge number of dollars” for premium after-life bolster for the working OS since Microsoft resigned it in April 2014.
