author: Bartlomiej Sagan
End of Support for Adobe Flash Brought Chineses Trains to a Standstill
Various local railway have been the object of travelers' jokes for years, but few can say they are worse than the Chinese one. After all, how many railways would be paralyzed just because the Flash plugin was disabled?
- Control system errors resulting from Adobe blocking Flash-based content paralyzed rail transportation in Dalian;
- It took more than 20 hours to restore normal operation.
January 12 will not go down as a good day in the memory of the residents of the Chinese city of Dalian, for whom rail is the main means of transport (interestingly, in the 40s of the last century the station located there was the largest and most modern in Asia). This is because no trains left the station on that day. If the reason were bad weather conditions or natural forces like earthquakes or floods, the event described here would not be funny. However, the culprit turned out to be... Adobe's Flash plug-in.
Although support for Adobe's browser extension expired at the end of last year and was being announced since three years age, not everyone managed to adapt. The train control system at Dalian Station failed to display data necessary for the operation of rail transport in the area. After consulting the Internet, a technician realized that the dysfunction was caused by Adobe blocking Flash-based content.
The icing on the cake was the implementation of a solution to the problem, which took more than 20 hours. Namely, a team of specialists was appointed, which came to the conclusion that it is enough to deactivate the plug-in. For this purpose, a spare computer (with an old version of Flash) was used, which was delivered to the station, and then a number of tests were carried out to allow the operation of trains. It is also worth mentioning that some of the computers that are part of the rail transport control system run on a pirated version of Windows. As for the rest, let us remain silent.