Adobe Download Manager Installing Software Without Consent 98
"Not all is worth cheering about as Adobe turns 20," writes reader adeelarshad82, who excerpts from a story at PC Magazine's Security Watch: "Researcher Aviv Raff has found a problem in ADM (Adobe Download Manager) and the method through which it is delivered from adobe.com. The net effect of the problem is that a user can be tricked into downloading and installing software using ADM without actual consent. Tonight Adobe acknowledged the report and said they were working on the issue with Raff and NOS Microsystems, the company that wrote ADM."
Bonjour (Score:5, Informative)
Bonjour [wikipedia.org] is just as bad. It scans your LAN constantly, takes A LOT resources and provides nothing good. And it's installed without asking you along any Adobe product.
Disable (Score:5, Informative)
DLM? No thank you (Score:5, Informative)
I've always distrusted Adobe simply for pushing the Google Toolbar, or these days McAfee. An easy way to get Reader or Flash without getting stuck with their stupid and unnecessary DLM is to cancel the first download, and then "click here if your download doesn't start". That way you only get the installer you wanted, not all the other crap they're trying to push on you.
A minor nit (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe is about 28 this year. It's Photoshop that is 20.
Re:No surprise there.... (Score:2, Informative)
No apt-get (or aptitude as you should use) is a package manager. Stuff Adobe gives you, or whatever iTunes installs, or any Windows updater for non-OS software are download managers.
Go download some drivers at Dell. It will ask you to install a download manager for its drivers. What for? That's a download manager to me.
Re:Bonjour (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair to Apple, they only did that the one time - and learnt their lesson *really* quickly! Now it shows up in Apple Software Update, but un-ticked.
Which is fine by me, as I don't have any need for Safari. Already have Firefox for day-to-day browsing, Chrome for testing, and IE for just remote access to work.
-MT.
Re:Bonjour (Score:4, Informative)
The Tragedy of Adobe (Score:3, Informative)
Instead of getting off my lawn, sit down and I'll tell you kids a story: In the Good ole days Adobe and it's founder John Warnock (or Warnock's Algorithm fame) were heroes. At the time most of us had ugly dot matrix printers and fixed fonts, they came up with the PostScript printer description language and many beautiful fonts. Buy a Postscript printer and you could print beautiful documents previously only typesetters could. When Apple licensed it for their laser printer desktop publishing took off. Warnock cared about beautiful fonts. Postscript was a full-blown programming language, yet a very efficient one. PDF itself *is* Postscript, just encapsulated in a file.
But Adobe then isn't Adobe now. Their Adobe Reader is an appalling, fat, unresponsive hard to drive piece of software. Ever configured options? There are twenty off preference pages with no coherent grouping. They still haven't grasped things like reopening the document where you last were reading it, or letting you add bookmarks. Instead they've loaded Adobe with a tonne of "features" to the point it's now a trojan horse vector. The company itself is no longer a source of innovation: Instead they just buy out other companies (like Macromedia Flash) and then run them into the ground. Their software uniformly suffers from appalling GUIs (or if it doesn't when they buy it, they shortly will) e.g. Photoshop, but when you're that big you can afford to be that arrogant. People will buy your software anyway, because they don't have a choice.
Yes, there are some PDF Reader imitators like Foxit Software. While they're much faster, they have copied the Adobe interface instead of themselves innovating.
The Adobe Updater is an intrusive pain in the ass. In a previous version, you had to connect to the net and then connect to Adobe to turn off the Updater. This was "free" software, so this wasn't for licensing: It was just lame in-your-face programming by lame programmers. If you try and deleted the Updater yourself, it reinstalled itself. In the end I found out if you deleted it (in your Program Files directory) and then replace plain files with directories and directories with plain files so when it goes try and reinstall itself Windows tells it to get lost.
Re:Free software (Score:5, Informative)
"Anyway to get them for "force" a free download of PhotoShop?"
No, but blocking the proper entries in your hosts file as someone might do who didn't want Adobe warez "phoning home" would take care of unwanted "updates" nicely.
Re:No surprise there.... (Score:1, Informative)
I work at Adobe and from what I've heard, the reason we use this is that many browsers simply aren't reliable when downloading huge files over HTTP or FTP. Firefox has always seemed decent at it to me, but apparently there are enough out there that can't handle downloading all of Creative Suite... Maybe we will phase it out as newer browsers start to dominate the marketshare.
As for Bittorrent, that's probably asking for too much from many artist-types -- not to mention many IT policies block all "file sharing," including Bittorrent.