Adobe Flash Player security message - WHAT???

Well here's a new on on me.

I design websites. One of the sites I look after is the site for my local Blues Jam. I created it and I know the purpose of every scrap of code in it. It uses the JW Media Player to deliver mp3 and .flv content across numerous pages of the site, which has a very large archive of audio and video material.

I've just been editing one of its audio archive pages. Before uploading it to the server, I opened my local copy of the page in a browser to check that all of the mp3 player links were functioning OK.

When the page loaded, to my surprise this "Security warning" box appeared onscreen:



So let's get this right... My onboard installation of the Adobe Flash Player plugin is having a panic because an audio player .swf file that lives on my LOCAL copy of the website is trying to interact with a LOCAL copy of a page that uses it to play mp3s.

Pardon? I mean, why? Since when can a folder on one of my internal HDDs ever be regarded as an "internet-enabled location" ?

The only thing I can think of is that somehow Adobe Flash Player doesn't like the fact that (in common with all of its siblings in my "Clients" folder) this folder is set up for sharing. I do this in order that I can access it from my partner's Windows XP laptop via my domestic LAN, for page-testing purposes.

But wait - it gets better (or rather, worse). You might logically assume that hitting that "Settings" button would open a settings dialogue box that lives somewhere on my own machine. Oh no. Instead, I was taken to a page on the Adobe website - a flash-driven thing, of course - which contained a control panel for the security settings.

So, in order to adjust the security settings of a piece of software that lives on my own machine, Adobe expected me to make the changes via a widget on their website. Now call me old-fashioned, but from a security point of view, isn't that just a tad counter intuitive?