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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, 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.