MER Website Issues Options

[briv1016]

The sol number and local time feature on the MER site went down a week or so ago when I updated the flash player. I just get an "f" in the upper left-hand side of the two boxes with a link to the adobe website. I tried un-installing the flash player and re-installing it but it still doesn't work. Is anyone else having this problem?

[djellison]

Same here.

[Shaka]

ditto
dam'

[Toma B]

Me to...

ESA site to... :-(

[ArMaP]

It looks like Flash 10 breaks some things that were working fine with all the previous versions, that happened to a program I use that has a dialogue made with Flash and for which the buttons stopped working.

And the update is the real culprit, I used a virtual machine with Flash 9 installed and everything was good; I updated Flash, restarted the browser, and the "f" appeared instead of the image.

The solution, as far as I know, is uninstalling Flash 10 and installing Flash 9, the problem is finding it, I found it here.

The uninstaller is available on the Adobe site, just click on the "Different operating system or browser?" link on the "Install Adobe Flash Player" page.

Edit: I think the Flash 9 link I posted does not install Flash 9, it does not include the flash.ocx file. Sorry.

[djellison]

Flash 10 also breaks the image uploaded for Wordpress.

Doug

[TheChemist]

A great many thanks for the warning from all of us who still have not upgraded to v. 10 !

[BrianL]

Too late for me, although my Firefox seems to have escaped the "improvements". Hopefully, everyone starts playing nice again soon.

[helvick]

You can get a version of Flash 9 via FileHippo - it's a handy site for finding installers.

Flash 9 Installer for Firefox\Chrome\Safari
Flash 9 Installer for IE

I was able to upgrade to v10 and then downgrade back to v9 with these reliably.

I think it is only fair to point out that Adobe recommends that you upgrade to v10 and run at least version 10.0.12.36 because all 9.x and earlier versions are vulnerable to a number of fairly significant security flaws - http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bull.../apsb08-18.html

[BrianL]

I agree, it would be better if JPL made their site compatible with version 10.

[imipak]

I think it is only fair to point out that Adobe recommends that you upgrade to v10 and run at least version 10.0.12.36 because earlier versions are vulnerable to a number of fairly significant security flaws

< begin: infosec public service announcement...>

Indeed...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/31/si...l_trojan_heist/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/31/to...banking_trojan/

This thing, which infected victim's machines through Flash security bugs (amongst others) was in the wild and stealing bank / CC account information, personal ID data and passwords for 18 months before being discovered. (At that point a lot of people suddenly get virus alerts... without realising they've been infected for a long time.) Now that Windows auto-updates itself fairly reliably, the merchants of such remote-access trojans, data stealers, spam-bots and suchlike are increasingly relying on exploits against vulnerabilities in browser plugins - stuff like Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, even Java - and for more targeted attacks, things like Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Yes, it's a pain sometimes; I've found quite a few online video sites have broken in v10, most recently the Dan Maas / MER stuff -- *very* frustrating! - and "fullscreen" crashes my browser - however I'd rather have crashy software than an empty bank account. Youtube and the BBC News online works, and that's good enough for me. YMMV. If you really MUST use the older versions, I strongly recommend having two separate systems; treat one as expendable, and never do any online banking, checking webmail, or log into anything important on that machine.

Personally, I'd never rely on A/V, any more than I'd rely on a firewall; not having insecure, widely deployed software installed in the first place is a much better bet... and whatever you use, make sure you apply security patches & updates! Using "minority" apps, OSes (and even non-Intel x86 architectures) also helps reduce the threat a great deal. Of course, that still leaves targeted attacks by the proverbial North Korean ninja types,.. but that's another story.

You can check whether Flash needs an update, here:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewConten...rnalId=tn_15507

For Acrobat, you need to check the version manually ("Help" menu, then "About Acrobat Reader", in the stand-alone application.) At the time of writing the latest version is 8.1.2 . Get it here (Warning, 47Mb!)
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/read...llversions.html

[Del Palmer]

Youtube and the BBC News online works, and that's good enough for me.

But what about the MER clocks? I have them embedded in the upper right corner of my Home Page, and would really miss them if they didn't work. According to the Adobe site, I have version 9, which begs the question: why did my system miss out on the update? After all, the update is automatic, no? It has to be automatic, otherwise I'd still be on version 7, since I never manually update software that continues to work just fine.

[imipak]

why did my system miss out on the update? After all, the update is automatic, no?

Good question; I don't know the answer. In my experience, the Flash auto-updater doesn't work 100% reliably for everyone. (And if it did, no-one would be getting pwned thru' known vulnerabilities in it, which isn't the case.) It may be that it only makes point updates automatically, with major releases needing a manual intervention, like Firefox.

[Juramike]

This has probably been dealt with already, but I created a tiny EXCEL file that converts Oppy image filename data to Sol# for Opportunity:
 Mars_Opportunity_Rover_filename_to_Sol_number_converter.xls ( 19.5K ) Number of downloads: 634

Paste the full image file name into cell A3, and the approx. Sol number comes out in cell D3. These should match up to the Sol numbers listed in the Mars Exploratoin Rovers homepage on the NASA website.
(You can also just paste the timestemp in B3)
(I regenerated the calculation formula empirically, some of the online calculators I found drifted off in the higher Sol numbers)
It's not fancy, but it functions.
Enjoy!
-Mike

[jamescanvin]

I don't know what that has to do with flash player problems

However I find Tman's filename decoder both accurate and very useful.

http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/html/filenames_ltst.htm