China's Rail Board Network Failed As Adobe Killed Flash, Technicians Used Pirated Software Instead

In the past, Adobe Flash was the web browser plug-in powering many games, interfaces, as well as animated icons of the early web such as Homestar Runner. However, Flash is now gone, meaning those goofy web games cannot run anymore.

But more importantly, for some people in China, the death of Adobe Flash means they were late for work as the city of Dalian in the country was running its rail board system on the plug-in.

This is fascinating because even YouTube ran on Flash until 2015, but there are no good reasons why anyone would keep running an entire rail board network on Flash, with a lot of huge moving railcars transporting people inside.

When Adobe Flash was killed, the rail board network in Dalian was halted for 20 hours this Tuesday. The technicians of the network eventually got everything back up and running, but how they managed to do it is fascinating as well. Instead of switching the management system of the rail board network to a more modern codebase or software installation, they chose to install a pirated version of Adobe Flash that could still operate.

Using this method, and installing an older Flash version to work with the knock-off, they solved the problem.

In 2017, Adobe announced it would kill Flash, saying that competitors like HTML5, Web Assembly, WebGL, and Unity were good enough to provide an alternative to Flash. However, it could also be that Flash was unable to crack mobile and increasingly being ditched from browsers too. In 2010, Steve Jobs even criticized Flash in an open letter, and iPads, iPhones never supported the standard. Apple’s browser Safari was the first to drop support for Adobe Flash.

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