SamY from the forum got off the phone with an Archos customer service person who said that there is a firmware update coming up later this month with Flash 9 support. This might also bring some Opera browser improvements (faster scrolling and more) and perhaps it will close the hacker vulnerability hopefully with some official statement on the possibility of the release of a software development kit.

What Flash 9 support could bring is compatibility with more video portals such as http://vids.myspace.com, http://metacafe.com, http://sevenload.com, http://vpod.tv – Streaming Flash video sites such as http://mogulus.com, http://ustream.tv and http://justin.tv might also work. More Flash Games could possibly work with this, required might possibly not only be that the Flash version support would be upgraded to version 9, but also that displaying of flash content in the browser better use hardware acceleration. Flash based streaming music services such as http://last.fm might also start to work with such an update.

This rumor was posted in this thread: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?t=11800