Fire Island Blog

Well, this is a bit of a blow for any company building widgets targeted at MySpace users. In order to prevent the spread of Flash based adware worms, MySpace are inserting code into Flash objects that stops external links working. The latest version of Flash Player 9 is required for this ‘fix’ to actually work and you can bet ya life that MySpace are actively encouraging users to upgrade, indeed MySpace’s own video service now requires Flash Player 9.

I’ve just tried it myself and sure enough, Flash objects that have a simple getURL action written into them, which opens a site in new window, now fail to work when they are embedded in a MySpace profile. MySpace are actually inserting an extra parameter into the HTML code that users embed into their profile, namely allowNetworking=internal which prevents the Flash object from any communication with the browser, the chief use of which is usually to open a hyperlink to a third-party website. Now, obviously these techniques can be used for nefarious means and MySpace wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t protect their users from malicious attack. But in doing so they have crippled a great many legitimate, honest service providers.

This is potentially pretty catastrophic for any company that is using MySpace as a way to spread the word about their product or service. We hope that Fantasy Festivals will fall into this category in the future, once we have built our Flash posters.

There’s more detail at Techcrunch… MySpace security measure disables viral spread of widgets.