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Acrobat Activation Agonies

By Ed Foster, Section The Gripelog
Posted on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 01:13:50 AM PDT

There has to be a better way. Even if you have some sympathy for software publishers wanting to protect themselves from piracy, anyone who has experienced the aggravation that a flawed copy protection scheme can cause knows that the industry's DRM approach just isn't working. That's certainly what one reader has learned from the tortured experience he's had with Adobe Acrobat activation over the last month.

(To hear this reader and others sound off on the vagaries of Digital Rights Management in general, listen to my "Failed DRM" podcast here.)

"Being a software developer I usually don't gripe much about the DRM stuff, as it comes with the territory," the reader wrote me weeks ago. "But here is one for the record books when it comes to stupid IT designs as far as the activation issues I encountered with Adobe. I upgraded from Acrobat 7.0 to 8.0, because the demos and features looked great. After installing it, I didn't really use it for a few months. Then I went to use it and it said it was not activated."

When the reader went to the menu, he was puzzled to see both the "Activate' and "Deactivate' buttons turned off. "Seems stupid -- shouldn't one always be highlighted?" the reader wondered. "After calling in, Adobe told me to run the repair function. I did, and it worked for one day, and then it was deactivated again and both buttons were off again. I called again and waited on hold forever to be told to uninstall and reinstall. So I uninstalled and it deactivated. I went to reinstall and it said I did not have an original product to upgrade from. Wow, like I'm supposed to keep all hundred-plus key codes I've ever had from Adobe. So after about 3 more people and a lot more time on the phone I got around the installation and activated again with a temp key. Then within hours it deactivated again."

The reader then entered a support nightmare from which he is yet to awaken. For weeks on end, tech after tech would tell him to run the repair function and reinstall. When that wouldn't work, the techs would begin speculating as to what changes he should make to him computer to placate the activation gods. "Gee, the guy would say, why do you need to mirror your hard drive?" the reader wrote. "Then they send me to another and the guy says, gee, if you upgrade or restore your drive, or change your configuration, or backup to Ghost, or use a RAID array, or use a disk defragger, the activation doesn't like it. Then they start asking why I need to do these things, which is none of their business."

Some of the Adobe techs mentioned that what the reader really needed to fix the activation problem was "Patch 2.70." Unfortunately, it seems Patch 2.70 is not provided to just any old Acrobat customer, and the reader had to supplicate his way up the support ladder to find someone who could authorize sending it to him. "I finally get to the right guy and he asks me why I need it and why I can't stop mirroring and defragging and using Ghost. Finally he says he'll escalate the issue and I'll have an e-mail in 24 hours. Next day there's no e-mail so I call back. It was never escalated and I have to start the process of filing to get the patch all over again."

The reader is a stubborn man, though, and he eventually prevailed upon Adobe to send him Patch 2.70. It didn't help. Several more weeks of escalations to supervisors and higher levels of Adobe support have followed, without success. Last week Adobe promised to send him a copy of Acrobat - presumably the corporate version - that would get around the problem. But at last report it still hasn't shown, so the reader's copy of Acrobat 8 remains deactivated.

"The amount of time, support, and money that Adobe and I have wasted on this is crazy," the reader wrote. "I understand protecting your product, but these people have gone way overboard with this activation that's tied so closely to the hardware that you can't do anything that doesn't upset it. Many people back up, restore, defrag and mirror disks and many more will do so as the prices come down. I think Adobe needs to clean some management house, toss out this stupid activation process, and get something that works instead of the runaround."

It seems to the reader that a much simpler activation process would be far less prone to failure. "Why not just ping their site once a month to validate the license number and count the installations under that product key? If I exceed my license count, the next month they don't allow the copy to activate any more. Then if I give my license key away to a friend or post it on the Internet, I'm just hurting myself. But if I change hardware machines I could deactivate it on the old one and reactivate it on the new system."

I'm not sure how viable the reader's idea is, but it certainly does make some sense that if the DRM is going to be phoning home periodically anyway, there's no reason it has to be tied to specific hardware components of your system. Yes, key codes can be stolen, but - as Microsoft as so amply demonstrated with its multiple tiers of activation, Windows Genuine Advantage validation, and now SPP - that's going to happen regardless of how many levels of copy protection you stack on a product. And as the reader's experience with Adobe attests, trying to make the activation scheme more sophisticated can just increase the points of failure and the burden on legitimate customers as well as the software publisher's support staff.

Is there a better way for software publishers to fight piracy than the type of aggravating activation Adobe's adopted? Surely there must be. Tell us what you think the solution is. Post your comments below, write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com or phone the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916.

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Acrobat Activation Agonies | 29 comments (29 topical) | Post A Comment

Agreed - Adobe's System is Too Severe[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#1)
by Will Fastie on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 07:10:12 AM PDT

I had to move a copy of Adobe Creative Suite to a new computer for one of my clients. Everything worked fine except for Photoshop, which turns out to be Adobe's most heavily protected product. I spent three hours on the phone over a five hour period before I finally got Adobe's blessing and Photoshop re-validated. Even then, I had to leave the user with administrative rights; any lower and Photoshop demanded to be activated.

The Adobe agents were polite and there was no yelling or screaming at my end. I listened carefully; at the end I decided that the whole point of the exercise was for the agent to decide that I was not trying to rip Adobe off. I think what tipped things in my favor what my calmness, my persistence, and the absolute consistency of my story. I say "story" because from Adobe's perspective it was probably viewed as a story to be proven true or false. I certainly resented that.

Adobe software has never been friendly when it comes to upgrading computers. It's always been difficult to get the settings right on the new system. Adobe activation just makes the process all the more difficult and, worse, interferes with the proper maintenance of the system.

As much as I have detested Microsoft's moves to activation and validation, the truth is that it has not caused me a single problem to date. So yes, Adobe needs to fix this. Or maybe I'll switch to Microsoft Expression Design. Maybe a little competition will get Adobe's attention.

[ Reply to This ]

How to Fight the DRM[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#24)
by Anonymous User on Mon Jun 18, 2007 at 11:48:12 AM PDT

You tell them that since they are unwilling to fix the product that you will take matters into your own hands and remove the protection yourself.

Read Hacker Disassembling, Hacker Debugging, and Secrets of Reverse Engineering. Get yourself a disassembling debugger, and NOP or change the branches to skip past their protection schemes and save the changes back into their executables/shared libs.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Bye Bye Adobe[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#2)
by VonSkippy on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 11:35:18 AM PDT

Forget Adobe, get PDF Converter (by Scansoft). Faster, leaner, way way way cheaper, and no stupid "we think you're a lying cheat) DRM.

Vote with your dollars, perhaps some of these moronic companies that treat the people who pay their bills like thieves will wise up.

[ Reply to This ]

it doesn't have to be that painful[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#3)
by cmerrill on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 12:54:54 PM PDT

There is no reason that a good DRM system has to be this painful. We just added a DRM system to our software with an activation/deactivation scenario - and so far it has worked reasonable well for the users. I attribute this to our priorities: throughout the specification and development (which were remarkably short - just a few weeks), our #1 priority was to make it painless for the users - completely transparent whenever possible. #2 priority was to make it easy to fix when it breaks - if something does go awry, we can easily and instantly fix the problem when the customer calls - and all support personnel have the authority to make the fix. Making the scheme difficult to hack was a distant 3rd in our priorities.

Our basic philosophy is to not punish honest users for the misdeeds of pirates. If a company's philosophy is to squeeze the turnip as much as possible, they would likely arrive at a solution different than ours :>

[ Reply to This ]

But it does have to be risky[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#14)
by enderlyn on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 09:33:00 AM PDT

Sorry, but Adobe, Microsoft, and others make the same claims you are making and we know they are dead wrong, at least for some users. If some of the largest software makers on the planet can't get it right, why should we believe you can?

As a developer myself I certainly understand the damage piracy can do to a software company. I also understand that the software industry has been cultivating ill-will toward it from its customer base for years with declining quality, declining support, and unbalanced licensing. DRM, whatever the short term gain may be for vendors, over the long term serves only to reinforce the impression among our customers that we, as an industry, don't give a damn about them. This is because DRM/activation is becoming synonymous with the restriction of customer rights and vendor arrogance.

Seriously, the whole 'keeping honest customers honest' phrase is the biggest bunch of insulting bag of nonsense I have ever heard in my life. If I am an honest customer I am, by definition, intrinsically so. I do not need to be 'kept' honest by my software vendor. So even if your DRM is 100% flawless and transparent I, as an honest user, would find its presence insulting because of the presumption all DRM makes: that I am a would be thief.

Beyond that, ther is the following list of issues that seem to crop up with all DRM/activation implementations:

- Adds an additional failure point to worry about.

- Adds a risk of de facto sun-setting should the vendor stop supporting activation for older versions.

- Adds a risk of loss of use should the vendor go under or product support dropped.

- Adds a risk of a drastic, unacceptable changes in activation terms should the vendor be purchased or has a change in management (or management's attitudes).

- May have problems working with specific hardware configurations, which adds an additional risk to configuration changes, upgrades, or repairs.

- May be too dependent on how the current version of the OS is implemented and fail when patches are installed or the OS is upgraded (XP Service Pack2 and Vista, anyone?).

- May have problems interacting with other vendors' DRM implementations.

- May have problems interacting with other software.

- May interact badly with certain drivers.

The first five of these are specific to DRM, but you could claim the remaining five could apply to any piece of softwrae. I understand that. But DRM must be viewed as separate because it is an additional point failure. In other words: though a specific app may not be impaired by any of these problems in a given installation, the DRM used to protect it might thus preventing the app from running. This leads to lost productivity, lost time, potential support hassles, and more.

This is why I believe that if you make decisions for an IT organization and you purchase and use mission critical software that employs DRM/activation mechanisms in your company for which viable DRM-free alternatives exists, then you are not doing your job because you are unnecessarily putting your company at risk.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Doesn't have to be risky, either.[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#16)
by cmerrill on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 12:35:34 PM PDT

Ok, every additional feature is risky. But DRM does not need to be any more risky than any other.

> Sorry, but Adobe, Microsoft, and others make the same claims you are making and we know they are dead
> wrong, at least for some users. If some of the largest software makers on the planet can't get it
> right, why should we believe you can?

This results in:
1) We _really_ value our customers and work hard to make them happy. We sell a fairly expensive product, so we can affort to spend some money on good support.
2) We recognize that anybody willing to spend umpteen hours trying to crack our system is not a potential customer -- meaning they will never spend money on our product, even if they fail to crack our DRM system. This means we can keep our system much simpler - since it only has to provide us with "reasonable" protection against illegal use.

Some of the points you raised are more related to the company policies than to the technology: #2, 3 and 4. If the company has demonstrated a willingness to treat customers in that way, than they are certainly valid issues.

For the technical issues:
#1 - every new feature has risk. This is no different. Not every feature is mission-criticial, but for us, many are. So DRM is no more risky than most of our work.
#5 & #6 - our system it not tied to hardware or OS - it is hardware agnostic (doesn't use anysort of hardware identifiers) and is cross-platform.
#6, #7, & #8 - Frankly, none of these apply to our system either.

The result, for us, is a system that is easier to crack than some of the others, but is very reliable and _very_ easy to fix when it fails.

I'm sure I haven't convinced you, but our customers are happy - and they're the ones we care about.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Of course it's risky[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#17)
by enderlyn on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 03:41:57 PM PDT

We are very different from Adobe, Microsoft, et. al. in several ways, the two most important are that (1) our product is considerably more expensive than Windows or Acrobat and (2) our customer base is rather narrow.

I can say the same about the company I write software for as well (day job, anyway). We have chosen not to employ DRM. Instead we put our time and energy into quality features and quality service. Believe it or not, a good number of our customers praise us for not using any sort of DRM/activation.

There is a slow backlash against this stuff building in IT. It will take time, but it is coming. I do not doubt your sincerity for a second when you say you have great customer service. I am sure you do. But understand that DRM/activation problems encountered by customers of MS, Adobe, and others is making the whole concept onerous. And, to be honest, I still believe the risks of relying on software that uses it are too high. Why add the additional point of failure that DRM brings when it is completely unnecessary to running your department? Sorry, but software without DRM/activation does not have that failure point.

Ok, every additional feature is risky. But DRM does not need to be any more risky than any other.

There are two problems with this statement. The first is that DRM, from a customer perspective, adds no value to software. It does not help them get work done. It accomplishes no useful tasks for the user. Simply put: from a user perspective DRM is not a feature at all.

As for the second problem, I don't know about you, but I work very hard to make sure a failure of one element in my software does not bring about failure in the application as a whole whenever this is possible. It's just good defensive design sense in your application architecture. DRM/activation runs contrary to this practice because a failure in this system prevents the application from working and, depending on implementation, may commit the ultimate sin of holding data hostage.

Some of the points you raised are more related to the company policies than to the technology: #2, 3 and 4. If the company has demonstrated a willingness to treat customers in that way, than they are certainly valid issues.

These issues are valid regardless of how a company currently treats its customers. Many of us that read this site regularly (probably closer to all than not) have had some favorite vendor get acquired or go through a management change that brought with it a decline in customer service and other ills. Good management and service today does not necessarily mean the same for tomorrow. One of the ways you can protect yourself from such a change is to make sure you can install and use the software you purchased without having to go through the vendor or any other third party. The same goes for accessing your data.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

And what about when support is dropped..[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#22)
by Reziac on Tue Mar 06, 2007 at 12:50:46 PM PDT

...or the company goes under, and you still need that software and need it reactivated? Buying an upgrade is sometimes neither practical nor desirable, and being *forced* to do so is essentially extortion:

What if some bean-counter decides the best way toward higher revenues is to force everyone to upgrade by refusing to reactivate older versions, a la Intuit??

BTW I stopped upgrading my fave group of software when they went to activation -- and I'd bought a couple dozen versions before that, more because I wanted to than needed to. No more. :(
~REZ~
[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Something definitely wrong[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#4)
by mklange on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 12:58:12 PM PDT

There's definitely something wrong with this. If one of the previous posters required 3 hours to get Adobe to reactivate after moving machines (or sufficient hardware to make activation think it's on a new machine) think about what happens if everybody does this. I have at least 12 applications on my machine (13 if you count the OS). That means I would wind up spending 39 hours on the phone getting everything back on line -- that's a pretty big productivity hit. This is eventually going to do the same thing to computer and software sales that having to deal with car dealers has done to new car sales. People are going to have to be really desperate to get something new before going through the time and aggravation of dealing with all the nonsense, thus they are going to defer new purchases as long as possible, resulting in less sales than could have been had otherwise.

[ Reply to This ]

even their installs are awful[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#5)
by ijusth on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 01:16:11 PM PDT

When you upgrade your acrobat version it forces the machine to reboot several times and heaven help you if you are a few revisions back. You can't just install the latest patch. You need to step all of the way through older patches and multiple reboots to get to where you want. Well my company tried to avoid the reboots (and lost work time) to the 10s of thousands of employees by creating a custom installation. The install went fine but one of the functions of the installer that adobe provides seems to be a removal of previous version only upon reboot. We went from version 7.0 to 7.08. Now SMS sees both versions and we get a double count. The same is happening for version 7.09 so things haven't been fixed.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Acrobat 7.0x auto-update hell[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by stevecrye on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 03:08:33 PM PDT

I finally set Zone Alarm to disallow Acrobat access to the internet, after man-days of struggling with failed auto-updates. IMHO, the only products that Adobe makes that are worth anything are Photoshop ( their original money-maker) and Dreamweaver ( they bought the company). The rest of their stuff is valueless. Steve

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

DRM has cost Adobe/Macromedia dollars from me[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#10)
by chuckbo on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 09:50:52 PM PDT

Sure true for me. I would've upgraded my Dreamweaver and Fireworks and Flash a couple of times except that it meant having to risk DRM mistakes and shutdowns. I'd hold off forever (except that I'll probably have to upgrade when I switch to the Intel-Mac).

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

More Than One Reason To Use Something Elase[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#6)
by BytePusher on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 02:38:56 PM PDT

Our small business recently upgraded Acrobat to 8.0. With the previous version, when attempting to create a PDF file from an application, it had to go through a 5 minute timeout period, requiring a retry, before the Acrobat program took over. Then it took 3-4 minutes to create the file even if the document only contained the single word "test". After installing v8.0, it no longer requires the "retry" event but it still takes about 5 minutes to create the "test" file.

After windows has been up for many hours during which I may have created several PDF files, I have found the process "acrodist.exe" running and using about 10 percent of CPU capacity even when no ligitimate Acrobat functions have been activated. I have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Acrobat DRM routines are running amok in an infinite loop and are chewing up my computer resources. If I don't see any software fixes from Adobe this year, this is the last time I will be using their products. That will be a shame because I also use the Adobe Illustrator products but I also use Corel graphics products.

The price of acquisition for Adobe products has always been high but acceptable because of their quality. Now the cost of ownership has become unacceptibly high in hours spent in supporting their products plus additional cost in lost time using their products.

This is another American tribute to greed, stupidity, and distain for customers.

---

Experience is NOT the best teacher; it is the worst teacher. Other's experiences are the best teachers.
[ Reply to This ]

Clarification[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#11)
by foxyshadis1 on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 01:05:39 AM PDT

acrodist is distiller, the pdf generator. Somehow your installation or OS is messily corrupted, but around Adobe products that's hardly unusual.

I've only used Acrobat 7, which had enough (non-DRM) upgrade hassles from 6 to keep me from going to 8 until I absolutely have to. (Thought I'd need to for enabling form-saving in reader, but it wasn't a critical need.) I can't wait to get screwed over yet again by them. The only reasonably-priced alternatives I can find for that functionality are all client-side, which would be prohibitively expensive.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Acrodist.exe[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#19)
by BytePusher on Thu Mar 01, 2007 at 07:11:26 PM PDT

You are right. In my case, v8.0 of acrodist.exe obviously has three significant problems.

1. It spontaneously starts without me triggering it and then runs forever.

2. While it is running, even with no other application software active, its use of CPU capacity fluxuates between 0 and 50 percent seemingly averaging out around 10 percent.

3. While running on its own, it constantly performs I/O during which its memory usage fluxuates up and down with a strong upward trend. Watching it for about 5 minutes, I saw it increase from about 18.5 MB to almost 21 MB. Over time, a runaway process with a memory leak this bad will eventually absorb all available memory resources and effectivly crash the computer. In the past two days, I have spent about 8 hours on the phone either waiting for someone to answer or talking to a tech to try to isolate a more serious problem than this one and perhaps address this problem as well.

I am not aware of any product other than Adobe Acrobat that will produce distilled files in high resolution suitable for high quality publication. It is absolutely essential to me that these problems be resolved with the Adobe Acrobat product. My only alternative is to revert to an older version of Adobe Acrobat which I am now doing on a production computer. That is not a viable alternative because that leaves a known and repeatable Acrobat flaw undetected and unfixed. According to Adobe, my more serious problem is one that they have never seen before so my single computer is the only test bed in existence that can detect, demonstrate, and replicate the problem.

---

Experience is NOT the best teacher; it is the worst teacher. Other's experiences are the best teachers.
[ Parent | Reply to This ]

yes[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#50)
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[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Acrobat & Activation[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#7)
by Enoemos on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 03:05:35 PM PDT

I moved from version 7 back to version 6 because the form creation setup in version 7 is a confusing mess, and also because version 6 doesn't require activation. I will continue to use version 6 for as long as it will run (I suspect that eventually, Windows will change enough to kill it).

I try to avoid any software that requires activation, as I think that activation schemes have very little to do with piracy (hackers will always find ways around it). It has to do with money. When the manufacturer wants to force you to upgrade, all they have to do is to drop activation support. The next time you change some hardware you're forced to buy the new version, whether you need it or not.

The schemes that phone home periodically are even worse, as they can force you to upgrade even if you haven't changed hardware. I keep my firewall configured so that no software is allowed to phone home unless I authorize it, and I rarely do unless I'm performing an initial install or an upgrade. If the software won't operate without being allowed to phone home, then I remove it and try to get my money back.

Down with Product Activation schemes!!

[ Reply to This ]

When Adobe Pulls This Crap Bypass Their Activation[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#9)
by topaz on Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 06:43:53 PM PDT

Whenever I run into activation scheme problems with my legally purchased software that I paid good money for, I don't bother wasting my valuable time playing phone games with these people. I simply search for an activation crack on the internet and apply it. No more problems. It works every time for me. And I don't think theres anything wrong with doing that because I did purchased the software. Don't defrag? Don't mirror? Don't use Ghost? The people at Adobe are all under illusions to bellieve that people should not do these essential, necessary things just to comply with their copy protection that hinder and inconvenience bona fide customers. Sooner or later, sooner I think, Adobe is going to suffer the consequences for their negative behavior.

[ Reply to This ]

Adobe sacrifices performance, function for DRM [ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#12)
by DavidBSpalding on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 05:58:57 AM PDT

I upgraded recently to Acrobat Std 7, and Photoshop CS2. Both go modal and non-responsive at runtime for a 10-20 seconds while some Adobe License Manager service loads and futzes around online. I've watched it. Acrobat consistently locks up and won't page up, page down, zoom, or do diddly-squat for several seconds, without explanation.

I won't upgrade. There are other great programs out there, and for the price, Adobe owes it to customers to put product performance and reliability FIRST. Anything else is consumer disregard, and should be punished by voting with our wallets. Based on what I've read, I wouldn't use Acrobat 8 if you paid me to.

[ Reply to This ]

Acrobat v8 activation drama[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#13)
by partan on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 08:42:15 AM PDT

We installed Adobe Acrobat v8.0 on one of our user's PCs. Since then the PC was replaced by a laptop and upgraded another time as well. After the third hardware upgrade, the software ran fine for about 2 weeks. After that it asked to be activated again. We activated it and it seems to be OK now, but I'm wondering how many times I can activate the same license. By my count, that's 4 activations. Is there a limit? I'm afraid what might happen when we reach the limit. All my user wants to do is create pdfs. She doesn't care about the activation, or should she?!?!?

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

yes[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#51)
by maderikapapa on Sat Jun 28, 2008 at 01:40:41 AM PDT

Any apps that hide S/Ns?[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#15)
by BUL2294 on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 10:18:52 AM PDT

The common theme to these DRM schemes is that they tie themselves to specific CPU, hard drive, BIOS serial numbers or values... So why doesn't someone create a driver or even a rootkit that "hides" them, sets them all to 0's, or creates a random value? Do this right after a clean OS install and DRM schemes would tie themselves to fake values... As part of this, the utility creates a key file that could be saved off to a floppy, USB key, etc. If an operating system is reinstalled or hardware replaced/upgraded, and this utility & key reinstalled, then the key file's values would hide the true values with the already useful old values. No more fears of Adobe's DRM not working with RAID drives. You could also Ghost one drive onto another with no fear of upsetting a DRM scheme since both appear to have the same serial number...

Personally, if such a utility was a well-designed rootkit, then I'd have no objections to it being on my machine--since it serves my needs and isn't working against me... The assumption is that the only way DRM could get around such a rootkit would be via another rootkit--and we all saw what happened when Sony tried to use a rootkit...

Just an idea...

[ Reply to This ]

Avoid software with activation![ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#18)
by James Bond on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 07:39:25 PM PDT

This story is just what I expect to hear about these draconian activation schemes that are being used by Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe and others now.

If, as someone else said, the Adobe support people really tell users not to use RAID (this is long known to cause problems with Adobe's activation, back with Acrobat 7) or Ghost or other backup software to image their systems, then I must say they are really out of touch with reality.

And recently there was a story Windows Vista "deactivated" itself and threatened to go into "Reduced Functionality Mode" when another software was installed on it. And Microsoft CEO Ballmer is talking about "strengthing" the DRM to "squeeze" more revenue from users.

I am still using Windows XP (Corporate version with no activation) and Adobe Photoshop Elements (which has no activation, unlike Photoshop) at this time. But all these news just reinforce my decision not to give any more of my money to support these evil companies (Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe) for they are just going to use that money to create even more draconian protection measures for their new softwares.

I have essentially dumped Microsoft Office in favour of OpenOffice (now 2.1) which works well for me. I am also using Dreamweaver MX (older version with no activation) which still works fine under Windows XP. I will not upgrade to Windows Vista and newer versions of Microsoft Office, Photoshop and Dreamweaver as they are all infested with these activation schemes. I will also tell all other people I know to avoid them.

[ Reply to This ]

Activation Agonies[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#20)
by bboyle on Fri Mar 02, 2007 at 10:59:08 AM PDT

I have to ask, how does one use software that requires activation in a non-networked environment, or one that has no physical connection to the Internet? In high security environments, it may not be possible (or legal) to make such connections even temporarily for any reason.

So, I am ceasing to purchase any software that requires online activation or that wastes my time by requiring me to directly phone the software provider's support department in order to manually activate their product (which may not be possible if I and the computer are in another country and/or do not have LD or toll-free phone service available).

Wake up people! Vote with your pocketbooks! Let these boneheads find out that we are fed up and are not going to take it any more!

[ Reply to This ]

This is a known problem with Adobe's system[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#21)
by LasVegan on Fri Mar 02, 2007 at 07:43:36 PM PDT

The problem is with RAID arrays. When they are asked for the serial # of the drive some controllers give the ID of the first drive to respond. A program that checks the drive serial # to see if it's been moved will therefore repeatedly think it's been moved. I can understand how the mistake happened--it's not all RAID controllers that exhibit this behavior. What I can't understand is why they are still doing it.

[ Reply to This ]

Hmm.[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#23)
by Fushigi on Mon Mar 12, 2007 at 06:14:19 AM PDT

Makes me wonder how (or if) Acrobat would run in a VMWare session where all of the hardware is virtualized.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

bunsiness[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#29)
by Anonymous User on Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 04:43:51 AM PDT

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[ Reply to This ]

aderalahoo.com[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#48)
by rickman on Thu Jun 05, 2008 at 08:52:19 PM PDT

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[ Reply to This ]

wslaat[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#49)
by thegame on Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 06:02:23 AM PDT

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