Flash updated, check your privacy and security settings again

iPhoners may believe that Flash is dead, but if you ever tried to book a table from a restaurant homepage or watch video on non-YouTube sites you know better. Without Flash you'll stay hungry and miss out on lots of content. Flash for mobile is slowly dying, but it's gonna stay a necessary evil for years to come.

Adobe released yet another update to squash bugs and patch security holes. Unfortunately you have to reapply privacy and security settings that you may have set before.

Since early October Flash adds an icon in your app drawer that takes you to its Flash player settings page. There are two things to play with: "Local Storage" lets you block Flash supercookies that are usually set by annoying advertisers to follow you around on the web. The "Peer-Assisted Networking" page lets you save mobile data by switching peer-assisted networking off.

If you disabled local storage and peer-assisted networking before you better hit the Flash settings again. When I updated Flash both features were automatically reset to allow all, so I had to tame Flash again.

Don't forget to fire up the settings manager in all your Flash-enabled browsers, because your Flash settings for the stock browser don't carry over to Dolphin or Skyfire, and vice versa.

A security update that undoes your security settings... don't do this again, Adobe. Next update I expect my settings to stay.

• Flash (Android Market)

Adobe pulled Flash out of the Android Market Google Play Store and doesn't maintain Flash for Android anymore. If your Flashless phone stumbles upon a website that requires Flash (plenty of them still do) you can install and run an archived copy of Flash.