Slashdot Mirror
Adobe's Digital Editions Collecting Less Data, Says EFF
itwbennett writes Tests on the latest version of Adobe System's e-reader software shows the company is now collecting less data following a privacy-related dustup last month, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Adobe was criticized in early October after it was discovered Digital Editions collected metadata about e-books on a device, even if the e-books did not have DRM. Those logs were also sent to Adobe in plain text. Digital Editions version 4.0.1 appears to only collect data on e-books that have DRM (Digital Rights Management), writes Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the EFF.
What gives them the right to collect any data on how we USE the books?
I know we use data oddly in the language, but are we discussing discreet points of it, or does the quality of this data suffer?
I suppose "data" is "sand" and we don't count sands, but it still irks me.
Chrome has a read built in. Firefox too? There's no reason to use Adobe Reader AFAICT and hasn't been for at least a couple of years.
Collecting less than it did before? Collecting less than too much? Exactly where is and decides the defining line? I do... by not using adobe... well, anything. My devices are much happier for it.
So they are only spying on you when you read DRM'd books.
It is like the entire content industry wants people to choose piracy.
o Piracy means no one else knows what/when/where and how long you read/watch/listen to something
o Piracy means no worries about losing access to something you paid for
o Piracy means no lock-in to single devices or single manufacturer "ecosystems"
Even if pirated content wasn't cost free and commercial free, all the other ways these guys want to fook me over for the privilege of paying them money is enough to drive anyone to pirate.
don't confuse the pdf viewer (Reader) with the program to purchase and borrow digital books (ADE)
Chrome has a read built in. Firefox too?
Both of which in my experience are flakey as hell. For example right now Chrome will display the print preview on any PDF as a blank page. There is nothing wrong with the PDF and it will print fine but you can't see it. I've had an assortment of problems with both browser's PDF readers. Chrome especially tends to break things on a semi-regular basis in our company necessitating workarounds. Chrome sometimes will display a PDF and sometime forces you to download it with no rhyme or reason why. I'd say it was just my experience but the other folks in my company tend to see pretty much the same bugs at the same time.
Not saying Adobe Reader is great or anything but at least it works in spite of its other warts. I'm optimistic that the browsers will work out the kinks in due time but they don't work properly 100% of the time just yet.
Adobe is going to get exactly one single data point from me: I open a DRMed book in Adobe Digital Editions. However, I then strip the DRM and read the book in the PDF or ebook viewer of my choice. But ADE DRM has been cracked for so many years it baffles me while it is still used at all.
Of always just downloading all my reading material from The Pirate Bay.
Erh, people actually -use- Adobe DE for any other legitimate purpose besides stripping out that damn DRM on an ebook?
Didn't know it was useful for any other reason...
-> I dislike sigs...
Libraries use it to lend e-books. ALA was pretty ticked when it was brought to their attention. According a poll I can't seem to find at the moment libraries and museums are some of the only institutions still trusted today. http://www.ala.org/news/press-...
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
The article just says that data is sent less often and that it's encrypted.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
The EFF has become a free advertising grounds for Da Man now. Just like union bosses were actually relatives of Da Man, they sneak up and wriggle their ways up in these organizations pretending to defend the interest of unions or the public against the interests of Da Man, and once in key leadership positions, they can levarage and moderate the living life out of unions til they are all dead or lobotomized carcasses that still kick around and collect union dues without actually providing high paying jobs or any tangible benefit in return, all the while fucking up the whole country, shortsightedly laying waste the whole economy, just so that Da Man, one person, or a few people, a minor percentage of the population, can make more money, temporarily. Fuck the corrupt EFF pretending to protect the interests of the public. Fuck Adobe DRM. Fuck any DRM for that matter. Fuck the DMCA. To this day I refuse to watch a single DVD movie because it contains DRM. And I have the right to boycott DRM in my life like that, and I will try to live out the rest of my life without ever watching a single region coded and similar DRM carrying DVD. An exception of course would be a data disk containing nonDRM videos, without regions codes and the like.
What's really needed is some people in the government with some spines, who can nationalize these abusive private companies like Adobe, Microsoft, in fact all utility companies or monopolies, USRA style, and divide them up and re privatize them to other people who are not as unscrupulously conspiring like these fuckers, and who would actually compete against each other, know how to exercise self restraint when it goes against the interests of the public, and actually create useful stuff instead of concocting ways of how to put the rest of the population into even more restrictive bondage, and how to tap the creative energy, and channel the rewards from that into their own pocket, like the richest guys on the planet, a prime example being Bill Gates, a college dropout, who never created anything other than schemes of sucking out more money from creative people, and in return, from the rest of the population. What did Bill Gates create? GW BASIC? That's another run of the mill BASIC, which was originally created by Janos Kemeny and Tom Kurtz. The real creators of the early computing systems were Gary Kildall, with a PHD in computer science, who created the BIOS and DOS, the employees at Xerox who created Windows/GUI systems, with phd's, and the guys at DEC, with phd's, working on VMS who created the NT preemptive multitasking kernel that finally avoids constant blue-screening so common back in the 90's with windows. All the while making the choice to stay away from the overly complex and resource abusing C++, and stick with the simple and robust C for the windows API, but these days we have unimaginable bloat of java and dotnet, way beyond C++, and all the code made since about 2002 is pure raw shit and garbage, and they still want to shove it down your throat and extort billions for it. No thank you, take your fucking recently created software and shit code eat it yourself. All the while loading it up with more and more gargantuan control schemes like DRM, activation, etc. And they are looking for creative employees to exploit as coding slaves, not stopping themselves from intentionally infecting people with life threatening diseases, or making them wheelchair bound handicaps, by forcing them into intentional accidents, like a remote control car with a smooth power steering, so smooth that sometimes, on the highway, it steers opposite of the steering wheel, just to land you in a crash and make you wheelchair bound. Just so they have no other means of making a living then coding for them. These guys won't stop at anything. If anything these owners at Microsoft and Adobe need to be infected and forced to be wheelchair bound and handicapped, to get a little taste of their own medicine. And now their are trying to fix up their public image and goodwill by "philantropy", donating half a bill
I work at a library, and Adobe's log server has been in our firewall for a while now. It's a violation so blatant that it actually went up a few layers of management for a change.
First, data is plural. Should be 'one datum point'. You wouldn't say you shot one elephants in your pajamas, would you?
Second, this system should be collecting zero data points, because no one should use it. You may laugh at the onion on my belt, but it once was in fashion, and no corporation or government knows when or what books I read, or to whom I lend them. Until the same can be said of eBooks or digital editions, such systems are broken and not fit for any use.