Shockwave

The Shockwave Player is a web browser plug-in or helper

Nothing Happens

July 12, 2003. Windows XP Professional SP1 with all critical updates applied. Logged on as a restricted user. An online game required Shockwave and it was not installed. Go to the appropriate web page and say to download it. Nothing happens. No errors. No download. Nothing. The problem has to do with being a restricted user. When logged on as an administrative user, it worked fine.

Unpleasant Surprise

May 26, 2002. Internet Explorer v5.2 SP2 with all known patches. Windows 2000 SP2.

I went to a web site with an HTML color wheel and had to download a new version of the Shockwave Player to use the color wheel. At the end of the download, the player starts to install itself. The installation requires that no web browsers be running, however it doesn't tell you that until it's too late. The message about this from Shockwave is shown below. It appears to ask the user to close their web browser. However, at the point where this message is displayed it had already closed all instances of my browser, IE, which at the time was being used to view a half dozen different web pages. No real warning. In addition, it closed down my email program, Netscape Messenger v4.77 without warning.

Open browsers message is not quite accurate

As far as I can tell, the Shockwave Player that did this is version 8. File control.dll in the Shockwave directory is the ActiveX control and is version 8.5.1.102. The Shockwave installation refers to "thisupdateversion" as being 851102. The IE cache however (Tools->Internet Options->General Tab -> Settings button -> View Objects button) has a Shockwave ActiveX control at version 8,5,0,400.

At the end of the installation process, you are prompted to register as shown here. This requires (it is not optional) you to enter your name and email address. According to the installation log (file Shockwave.log in C:\WINNT\system32\Macromed\Shockwave 8), the program sent data back to Macromedia about my computer. The log seems to indicate that it ran an HTTP command called POST to send data to pinger.macromedia.com/foo.bar.

If I am reading the log correctly, Macromedia could link the personal information about the user to this other information. The other information appeared to be just release levels of various Macromedia software, but I can't be sure. Regardless of what the information is, using an HTTP POST to send data is designed to bypass your firewall, because every desktop firewall lets the web browser access the Internet. The abuse of your web browser to bypass a firewall is described more here.

As part of the registration, Macromedia seems to get informed of the web site that caused the download of the Shockwave player. This is based on finding the following URL (names have been changed to protect the innocent).

http://www.shockwave.com/bin/shockwave/visitor/welcome.jsp?
first=myfirstname&last=mylastname&email=myemailaddress&pref=n&lang=en&age=0&
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alterfin.com%2Fmirror%2FcolorWheel%2FalterShockWheel.html

FYI: It appears that this Shockwave player was downloaded from download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/director/english/win95nt/851102/

Page last updated: July 12, 2003