Adobe Systems acknowledged on Friday that is quietly added additional software to its Photoshop CS product to prevent the software from copying many of the world’s currencies. If you attempt to do so, a warning message is displayed.
While this may or may not be a bad idea, what scares me the most is that this is THIRD PARTY software added to the Photoshop program, which was added at the request of government regulators and international bankers! What is also frightening is that Adobe did not tell anyone about this addition until a few complaints started hitting their support board, and only then admitted what it had done. The boards are now full of complaints.
While Adobe says that this change will have minimal impact on customers (which is probably accurate), the fact that they were not planning on telling any of their users that they had done this is just wrong, and has angered many of its users. Adobe has basically listened to government and business interests and added censorship to its software without notifying users that a limitation exists. In addition, Adobe will not disclose who wrote the software or how it works, so who knows what else it may do?
What’s next? Will Photoshop block copies of copyrighted material? Will it prevent one from opening pictures of naked people? Maybe it will send a network notification when certain copyrighted material is copied back to Adobe so they can notify authorities?
Sorry Adobe, in my opinion, you blew it on this one!
-Owen Rubin-
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