Those hacky Russians…

Have you heard about this Sklyarov / Adobe / EFF thing? As it turns out, basically, Adobe’s encrypted PDF and eBook software is crap, and easily cracked. So at DefCon, Dmitry Sklyarov gave a little speech on how easy it was to crack it, and expressed distress that Adobe charges customers thousands of dollars to use it. He didn’t release his cracking software, he just explained it and pointed out the holes in Adobe’s security. Now, any self-respecting software company would hire this guy in a second, and make him Vice President of Keeping it Real, but no, Adobe decides to send the Feds after him and have him sent to prison. Cool. So the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) met with Adobe this week and the software giant has backed down on their charges, with Dmitry’s release in the hands of the Federal Govt. One of the EFF’s main points was that Adobe abused the DMCA and used it to arrest someone in a situation that it has no real control over. I think it’s pretty sad when companies suppress people like this instead of giving them the credit they deserve. I mean, the point is that the higher-ups at Adobe don’t know a god-damn thing about software or how it works, and so when a VP says ‘There’s this guy, and he cracked our software, and now he’s telling people that our copy-protection scheme sucks,’ and their knee-jerk response is to get them thrown in prison, because they don’t understand 2 things: 1) The hacker actually did something good for Adobe, because if they listened to him and fixed their software, Adobe’s customers would learn of it and be even more eager to buy it and 2) Bad software is something that needs to be FIXED, not ignored.

• Category: Uncategorized