How I'm spending my money

Write it and they will crack it.

Resistance is futile. :x

 

Iliah,

I agree 100%. Thanks for bringing it up.

 

Well the average user doesn't know where to find the programs. Without the program, the crack is useless.

 

I felt bad paying so much for Photoshop. Now I feel better. Sorry it's at your expense.

Grumbling totally OK with me.

Regards,

Mike

 

You should try computer games. The copy protection is so horrible some people can't install the game OR the game plays poorly BECAUSE if it yet the hackers have the crack and play the game within hours of release.

I actually download game cracks so my son and I can play games without the CD-ROM in the drive since the copy protection causes the drive to sometimes go crazy (the copy protected game is essentially difficult to read by some computers).

 

Iliah,

That's pretty ironic, no? Thomas Knoll makes a fuss about Nikon's "encryption" of WB info. Every hacker worth their 2 cents could've hacked that "encryption" -- and Adobe didn't even need to hack it themselves as David Coffin did it already and published the hack freely (via dcraw). Nobody's getting sued over the hack. But when you buy something from Adobe that you as a professional end-user actually want to protect your work, that protection is too weak to be of real use.

BTW, folks, don't for a minute believe that real encryption can be easily hacked if done right and intentionally so. When done right, it requires some serious brute force method to crack real encryption. Have you ever heard of the 56-bit RSA RC5 encryption secret key challenge that resulted in a worldwide project to try to hack using brute force method from ~8 years ago? I actually had a couple of my own PCs participate in the project for a while. Don't know how long it eventually took a worldwide community of desktop computers and workstations to finally crack, but it was definitely more than a whole year -- it took about one year to cycle through ~1/2(?) the keys looking for the one key needed to crack it. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of computers running around the clock. And that was only w/ 56-bit key -- nowadays, you can have 128-bit key, which means 2^72x or ~4.7 thousand x billion x billion times that previous~72 million x billion combinations.

http://www.sigpc.net/v1/n22.htm

Basically, if done right, the encryption should be essentially impenetrable. In cases where encryption is cracked, it's generally because it was done very sloppily *or* did not use a sufficiently good method -- for instance, the above mentioned 128-bit RSA is actually available for commercial use and used widely on the web nowadays. And FYI, it took a while even for the relatively weak DES encryption found in the DVD format to be cracked, and in that case, it was cracked mainly because one licensee of the DVD format did a sloppy job of it -- they left their key unprotected in their code -- so that the key was discovered by the kid who wrote DCSS.

BTW, in case everyone hasn't caught on, IMHO, I suspect Iliah is grumbling at least in part over Adobe's hypocrisy and sloppiness while they made a big fuss over what Nikon did w/ their WB info. OR maybe I'm just reading too much into his post.

_Man_

 

Probably off topic but I recently bought a wonderful Fujitsu automatic double-sided sheet feeding scanner for articles, bills and catalog pages. Included in the package was a license for a full version of Adobe acrobat, with serial number and all.

Well since installing it on my non-imaging machine it now takes 30 seconds to load any PDF or change a page. So I went to remove it from my PC through Control Panel. It asked me to install the CD (strange), then locked up. Now when I try to run Ad or Remove Program through Control Panel I get an error: Another oddity, Adobe Acrobat doesn't show up on my programs menu.

Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. And yes, I am logged in with administrator priveliges.

Maybe it's co-incidence but this Adobe is becoming an irritant.

Rich

 

Adobe has so many stupid patents on image editing software, they should really be sued for holding an unfair monopoly on the business. Adobe was once cool, but now they rank up there with other non-inovative companies such as Micro$oft, EA, Sony, etc.

 

Well over 500 lines deleted in the registry, a pass through with Registry Mechanic (15 Adobe errors fixed, thank you very much) and deleting every adobe acrobat folder in Program Files...then installing adobe acrobat reader 5.0 and it now takes 1/2 second to read a PDF again.

I swear, if N.C. addressed only a few more issues (or if RML was ready for prime time....and documented) I'd never have to use PS again. No trash intended Illiah..without documentation I'm lost. I subscribe to your beta forum and am drooling over what you've added.

I appreciate your technical posts as well; please keep them coming.

Rich