BEWARE OF ADOBES NEW COPY PROTECTION SOFTWARE IT CAN SERIOUSLY HARM YOUR COMPUTER

Question

Beware of Adobes new copy protection software it can seriously harm your computer!
The FlexNet licensing software that is installed on your computer along with CS3 and CS4, and possibly other, products has the capacity to seriously harm your system. It seems that it relies on some sort of insidious rootkit technology, which hides files on your hard drive. The trouble is that it is not robust and, if it gets broken, has the capacity to render your computer unusable by any product that uses this technology unless and until the hard drive is completely reformatted and everything properly reinstalled. Given that we all pay good money to prevent this doomsday scenario occurring in our computers, this should be unacceptable.
In particular, anyone who thinks that they can rely on disk imaging technology as a means of backing up or migrating system drives containing installations of Adobe CS3/4 should think again. Adobes new software and activation technology does not support disk cloning, and the result of using it is likely to render your computer permanently unusable, at least by Adobe products.
I know this because it has happened to me. My computer completely freezes suddenly anytime during or after running CS3. After spending some time investigating the problem, Adobe came up with the following astonishing response:
]"We have gone through all the material and logs once again, and came to the conclusion, the problem was in fact caused by cloning your hard drive. What happened is, that the FlexNet service, the service responsible for the activation and licensing of the product, has been damaged. Cloning our products is not supported by our products, and was therefore not tested either. The problem is, there are leftovers of the last Photoshop. installation's FlexNet files present in your system. To make matters worse, these files are well hidden, to protect our programs from piracy. Therefore, they can't be removed. Since a deactivation and reinstallation were already done to no avail, the only thing that's left to do, is a complete reformatting of your harddrive. We are very sorry to have to tell you this, but it really is the only option left.
Kind regards,
Adobe Technical Support"
Needless to say I am hopping mad! The implication that the problem is somehow my fault for daring to clone my hard drives is absurd! Disk imaging is a perfectly legitimate way of backing up and restoring or migrating hard drives and what they seem to be saying is that disk imaging as a backup & restore solution does not work with Adobe and Macromedia products. If this is so, a warning to this effect should be writ large on all of them.
To top it all, Adobes abdication of responsibility shows a blatant disregard for their paying customers. They have rolled out a technology that, by their own admission, has not been fully tested and which has the potential to inflict irrevocable harm on their customers computer systems as a result. (Even Microsoft would not dare to try to get away with such a thing!) They have done this to protect their software from piracy and thus to protect their revenue stream. Fine, but they should do this at their own expense, not at the expense of their loyal paying customers, and, when things do go wrong, they should be willing and able to provide a fix. If Adobe lose these paying customers, the piracy issue becomes irrelevant! (If you ask me, a far more elegant solution to the piracy problem would be to lower the price of the software, which is absurdly over-priced, certainly here in the UK.)
As a loyal customer and user of Photoshop virtually from day one, I do expect better than this. For the first time since I took up digital photography, I am looking for a different photo editing solution. I certainly do not think that any more of my hard earned cash will be heading in Adobes direction, at least until this is sorted out.

Answer 1

It is possible that cloning will work for some, maybe, for example, if done between identical disks. Adobe are saying that they do not guarantee that it will; and sometimes it won't.
However that is beside the point. Microsoft, bless their socks, have gone to great lengths to produce an operating system, which, for all its faults, is robust. If something gets broken, it will, 9 times out of 10 repair itself, and what remains is always fixable, once the problem is identified. It is amazing just how much abuse XP can take and still function.
Now Adobe has come along and done something that negates all of that. They have introduced a technology, that, once broken, cannot be fixed. That goes against the principles that everyone else has been working towards.
At the moment, few people may be affected (maybe more than Adobe care to admit to, and perhaps some who do not yet know that they are) but software users need to be wary of the thin end of the wedge. If all software vendors did similar things and played fast and loose with the basic fabric of the operating and file systems, all computers would soon be reduced to piles of junk.
That is why it is wrong.
Until Microsoft themselves support 3rd party product licensing and activation within the operating system, Adobe should hold off on this.