Pretty sure the latest Flash player requires hal to play protected content. There is a test video included in this link. http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/929/cpsid_92948.html
Also filed an Adobe Flash bug since HAL is being depreciated, 3103209 They might change flash player
Adobe isn't really being very helpful yet. https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3103209
I can confirm that playing protected content (at least via the Adobe test site) requires HAL. In the interest of seeing if it could possibly moved off of HAL, as we're not intending to support that long-term, I decided to see what the Flash plugin is using HAL for. Here is what it does with HAL: 1) Initializes HAL 2) Gets the 'system.hardware.serial' property of the computer. This is normally provided from DMI, and is the machine's serial number. 3) Enumerates all the disk drives in the system (all devices where 'storage.drive_type' is 'disk'.) 4) For each of these, gets the bus of the device ('storage.bus') 5) If this bus is *not* USB, it gets the serial number ('storage.serial') 6) Looks for a device with 'info.category' equal to 'processor'. I don't have one of these for whatever reason under F-16. From a bit of research, these are the ACPI cpu devices; the only distinguishing information attached to these devices is a description string, as far as I can tell. 7) It goes back to the disk devices. For each disk device, it again gets the bus of the device. ('storage.bus') 8) If this bus is *not* USB, it gets the size of the device ('storage.size') 9) De-initializes HAL It repeats this a couple of times, at least on their test video page. Not being Adobe, I am not going to speculate on why the plugin is collecting this data (system serial numbers, drive serial numbers, drive sizes, potentially processor identification strings), or what it's doing with this data once it is collected. But that is what it's using HAL for.
I also briefly discussed with Adodbe - given their recent announcements regarding the future of Flash on Linux, they're not invested in fixing this dependency.
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