Some Bloglines and Google newsreader users have written to us in recent days to complain that any BoingBoing posts which linked to Flash content (not embedded, but linked) would auto-play that Flash content (sometimes with seriously obnoxious sound). For the "web zen: barnyard zen" post, this meant that innocent BB readers were terrorized by the shrieking cries of kung fu bunnies, causing much pants-soilage over fears that PCs had been taken over by weird virii. Other readers pointed out that this was happening with some JPEG ads in our RSS feed which also linked to flash files. We did some digging, and found that our RSS feed was configured in such a way that linked-to Flash content would sometimes auto-play even when there was *no Flash embedded* in the post (example: in the bunny incident, a jpeg linked to the Flash file). We've fixed that, and we're very sorry for the annoyance!
BB housekeeping: auto-loading Flash in our RSS feed
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