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Adobe Goes After 27-Year Old 'Pirated' Copy of Acrobat Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS * TorrentFreak:
Today, there are many popular PDF readers available but Adobe’s original ‘Acrobat Reader’ is still the go-to software for many. Needless to say, Adobe doesn’t want third-parties to pirate its software, so the company regularly sends out DMCA notices to remove infringing copies.
[...] While this is totally understandable when it comes to newer releases, F-Secure researcher Mikko Hyppönen found out that Adobe’s takedown efforts go far beyond that.
In a recent tweet, Hyppönen mentioned that the software company removed one of his tweets that linked to an old copy of Acrobat Reader for MS-DOS. This software, hosted on WinWorld, came out more than 27-years ago, shortly after the PDF was invented.
The security researcher posted the tweet five years ago and at the time there were no issues. The message was copied a few weeks ago by his own Twitter bot, which reposts all his original tweets five years later.
“They sent a DMCA notice to my bot (@mikko__2016) when it posted that tweet on the tweet’s 5th anniversary. The original tweet is fine,” Hyppönen notes.
While the original tweet is still up, the reposted message was swiftly removed by Twitter. Not just that, the bot’s account was locked as well, which is standard practice nowadays.
Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partners. It doesn’t provide any further details on the reasons for taking it down, other than an alleged copyright infringement.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday March 17 2021, @01:16PM (4 children)
So it's like the last good working version of Adobe Acrobat Reader then? Without all the bloat and shit in it -- no javascript, no forms, no connecting to the internet. It's the dream version, can't allow the users that experience.
So can it still display modern PDF or are there some technical limitation here, such as memory usage. The program might just crash if you try and load a modern PDF file with all it's images and such.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Wednesday March 17 2021, @01:34PM (1 child)
In my opinion, the last good version of Acrobat Reader was 5.0.5.
Since you have obviously not had to deal with old versions, Adobe Acrobat and other PDF creator software usually generate PDF files that, for whatever dumb reason, claim to require the latest Acrobat Reader. This also has Adobe's desired effect of of breaking third party PDF readers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday March 18 2021, @04:53AM
I'd say 6.0, as not significantly different in how it operates, but can handle the newer format PDFs (the only reason I wound up switching from 5.0 -- way too many it wouldn't open).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @01:57PM
Ah, the fun that is the game of 'will or won't this fucking pdf open in Reader?' followed by 'will or won't this other piece of crap software open this pdf?'
I've files which I can view on all the PCs, irrespective of which OS they run, and what software I use to view them..they'll open on the old 1st gen Ipad thing, but, try loading them on an android device....which is why the phone and tablet now have 5 different programs installed which, in theory, one of which can open some of the pdf files I get given...usually, and the phone is a Octa-core beastie with 6GB RAM, so it has the theoretical grunt to do the work, at least you'd think so....
Based on that, I'd say any old DOS reader wouldn't stand much of a chance of rendering any modern pdf, ISTR early Windows implementations of Reader had issues with some image formats, royally borking them on-screen, these issues are probably why I have several thousand pdf format IC datasheets from back in the early-mid 90's where, for maximum compatibility, they opted for more or less fax quality bitmaps in the majority of the files, they're painful to view on a modern machine , but dread inertia about replacing them with better copies has meant they've been lurking on one file-server after another since '97..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @09:37PM
Not long after Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS came out, Adobe added a binary compressed format to PDF, obsoleting 1.0 and orphaning MS-DOS users.