When Adobe Stopped Flash Content From Running It Also Stopped A Chinese Railroad

Found on Jalopnik on Sunday, 24 January 2021
Browse Software

For a select few in China, though, the death of Flash meant being late to work, because the city of Dalian in northern China was running their railroad system on it. Yes, a railroad, run on Flash, the same thing used to run “free online casinos” and knockoff Breakout games in mortgage re-fi ads.

The railroad’s technicians did get everything back up and running, but the way they did this is fascinating, too. They didn’t switch the rail management system to some other, more modern codebase or software installation; instead, they installed a pirated version of Flash that was still operational.

It most likely won't even be fixed or migrated and just keep on running on a pirated and insecure piece of software.