Comment 18 for bug 1632870

First of all: pepperflashplugin-nonfree comes from Debian, as opposed to adobe-flashplugin which is Ubuntu-specific, and the fact that it is broken now that Google stops shipping the PPAPI Flash plugin with Chrome, starting with v54 released a few days ago, has been reported to the Debian maintainer Bart Martens:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833741
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=841373

To repair the package, he could use Adobe's website instead of Google Chrome as the source for the PPAPI Flash plugin: as Gunnar mentionned the PPAPI plugin is now officially available from Adobe:

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions

Using this source would probably be simpler than the redirector.gvt1.com link, or ripping libpepflashplayer.so from Canonical's adobe-flashplugin package.

That said, if the Debian maintainer fixes the package, changes to it will only land in the development release of Ubuntu, not in the already-released releases, unless an Ubuntu universe/multiverse maintainer manually updates it, which I wouldn't hold my breath for, given how few they are for so many packages. So Trusty/Xenial/Yakkety users will probably stay stuck with a broken pepperflashplugin-nonfree.

Anyway, Ubuntu users are no longer supposed to use this package, as Gunnar mentionned, they should use Canonical's adobe-flashplugin instead as their source for the PPAPI Flash plugin:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/Getting-Flash

Gunnar's packaging of the updated beta NPAPI plugin is a new possibility too (for Firefox users), thanks Gunnar.

In any case, and despite our wishes, pepperflashplugin-nonfree is unlikely to disappear from Ubuntu, because it is Debian users' sole (packaged) way of getting the PPAPI Flash plugin and because it has no Ubuntu maintainer who could stop it from being imported from Debian at each new Ubuntu development cycle.