They're actually up-to-date Adobe binaries as the article says that Adobe's Chinese Flash subsidiary still maintains Flash and releases security updates for it each month.

> The Chinese version of Flash receives one security update per month and can be freely downloaded from Flash.cn but also has significant strings attached. It comes preinstalled with an adware program called Flash Helper which, according to security sources, exhibits malicious behavior. Developed by ‘darktohka’ and previously located on Github, Clean Flash Installer solves these problems and more.

> “Clean Flash Installer installs this up-to-date freely available version of Flash, but it comes WITHOUT the adware program,” darktohka informs TorrentFreak.

I will never understand the perversion of walling off security updates behind paywalls or geographic walls.

...depending on your legal department, it might be to ward off out of geo liabilities or expectations of support (whether actual or simply perceived).

I've never heard of a company being held liable for releasing even a paid product with defective security, let alone a free one. They're not even held liable for deliberately including spyware [1]! That any lawyer would believe a company would be held liable for releasing an imperfect security patch is beyond absurd, and nothing more than a convenient excuse for abusive practices.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...

That looks like a sweet project. I'm happy to see web assembly being used in it too. I'll have to add it my long list of things I want to get around to tinkering with.

thats what I was thinking as well when I read the title. Good to hear its not about ruffle.

Yes.

Is there a non-Adobe authoring tool for Flash that's still around?

Depends on your use case, some game dev tools still export to swf. Like Haxe: https://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/compiler-targets... https://haxe.org/manual/target-flash-getting-started.html