Fog


thing is it's not far from the norm.. e.g. thq freebie game... and the arturia moog thing a while back

and adobe pretty much left their links open .. the links I got linked directly to adobe.. so you think.. must be legit then

by the time I looked at your links, the page was already down.   Had I downloaded, and found out that it was, "a mistake," I would've uninstalled.


However, "I agree with you."  I did not question it, and I found no harm in it, and frankly, "from my vantage point," it seems like software companies use freeware, as a way to market themselves.


  Seriously, "from small one man shop, to huge multinational," these software companies create a lot of freeware.   I did not find, "freeware photoshop," odd.  Not one, one bit. 

But I guess, "it was a mistake."

Fog, think of it this way. there are lots of companies that use the method of letting you download the program but make you activate i separately. if some prankster wanted to tell everyone the product was free and put up a legit link to the install file, it would seem legit until the person installed and realized they had been duped, not by the company but by the person who put up the link misrepresenting what that link meant.

sorry, most companies I deal with bother to hide their paid products on their site far better.. from the public far better, regardless.. 

sure there is the whole activate thing, but this was like putting a key to a mansion under the flower pot / welcome mat ... like the old days... when folk had nothing worth robbing (which was more the case than safer..)

you kinda expect a bit better from adobe.. it's not like it's some garden shed operation and I doubt I'm the only one who looked at it that way, from links that should have check with them.

the clue would be the web traffic generated also.. it would have seriously spiked their bandwidth to make them question why it was so high.

tons of companies offer the install file in a very easy to get manner, if someone happens to provide you the link. If you had not been directed to that very spot, i highly doubt you would have just stumbled upon it. Adobe is actually the only true victim in this. adobe and many other companies have offered files in this manner without a hitch. Cakewalk has offered files in this manner and if someone had posted it in a blog, something similar could have occured. It just was not accompanied by someone posting links with misleading information. It's not like somebody is sitting at adobe's various offices monitoring web traffic every second 24/7. It's easy to be a monday morning qb, but i'm not sure if my first guess to unusually high traffic would have been "i wonder if some idiot blogger lied about us having free software". In fact, I would guess they went through other troubleshooting procedures before.

the referral URL and IP would have kinda given it away , where it was coming from.

it's not even a case of manually monitoring, you set up the server or main gateway , to do that when it reaches a certain level etc. much like you can get your router to send you reports of attacks on your connection.


It'll be interesting what they do regarding it in the next few days. I guess they have to make an official comment on it.

http://www.theregister.co...ee_adobe_cs2_download/

is another thing regarding it..


that photoshop has 1 interest for me, a friend told me who uses it.. that it does 2x1 pixels (for older 8 bit drawing) so it's handy for that

I guarantee adobe isn't going to do much more than offer obligatory apologies. At the most they may offer a discount on the products they do sale. They are certainly not going give away CS2 or even offer it for sale at a discount. Adobe hates putting it's legacy products in circulation, hence their upgrade policies that make it disadvantageous to skip upgrades. Your best bet may be finding someone with an old license that is willing to sell to you for dirt cheap.

who said I wanted to buy it ? giving it away free is one thing.. but there are free alternatives , in the case of retro graphics where the dimensions are odd / not squares it don't justify paying out a silly amount of money.. or other things I use that aren't that are just as capable for what I want anyway.

i was just throwing out options if it was something you truly needed.