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Honestly? Adobe has been pulling this sort of bad stuff for a while now, it is not just a dumb mistake.

I am a hardcore fan of Macromedia Fireworks, and Adobe releases caused so much problems that I decided to use Macromedia Fireworks in the literal sense (ie: in my current machine, I have Macromedia Fireworks 8 installed).

When Adobe bought Macromedia, I installed their Adobe Fireworks thinking it would be just an updated Fireworks... it was right, and wrong, right because it barely had any new features or bug fixes, wrong because it install for some reason needed "adobe common files" anyway, and installed 3gb of crap on my disc (when discs were still 20gb big, thus it was a huge waste of space), AND somehow it conflicted with their own Adobe Reader and made it stop working.

When Adobe Fireworks CS3 was released, I was in university, I was excited to try it... and not only found again it had almost no new features, old features don't worked correctly either, most aggravatingly, the selection boxes would always render in the wrong place, and not just 1 pixel off, they would be completely off, when I tried to input text for example, the text box appeared 300 pixels away from the actual text.

When a friend installed it on his computer, the computer started misbehaving.

And the problems kept coming, to the point that eventually I gave up, I have no idea what version Fireworks is now, because I decided when CS6 came out, to install on my machine Macromedia Fireworks, and not install any Adobe product on my computer (eventually I found it was hard to avoid Acrobat Reader, thus now I install it, but only that).

EDIT: Also I always disable Adobe Updater, the first thing I do after installing any Adobe product on any computer for any reason, is shut down the updater process, and forbid it from running.

can relate to that. adobe's arrogant shit show destroyed the best fireworks.

Adobe EOLd Fireworks in 2012.

I go one step further - I block all access to Adobe's update servers at the router so it can never get there.

Old Macromedia Fireworks (and current Adobe Cloud) user here. Fireworks still has not changed in any positive way since Macromedia developed it.

The bright side is that they haven't completely ruined it. I haven't noticed the text box problem, but I skipped many versions before I switched over to OSX and had to get the new one.

Except that it's not just a hidden folder in the root directory. It's the first folder sorted by name in the root directory...

Which if you have no hidden files .in / ends up being /Applications !

> Remember that time Valve had a bug in Steam for Linux that would wipe the user's hard drive? [1]

Counter-point:

* Let's be honest, Linux is not a first class gaming platform. Linux is not going to be Steam's #1 platform. Whereas here it's an Adobe product on OSX.

* The Steam bug was triggered by the user moving ~/.local/share/steam. That's not something that users will be doing regularly. Whereas this Adobe bug wasn't caused by any uncommon behaviour.

> Developers don't have them because they understand the unix way and know they shouldn't be putting files there.

Developers are very definitly going to have dot-files. .ssh, .vim, .bashrc, .local, .gnome, .mozilla, etc. etc. If something wiped my SSH private keys on my desktop, that would be a massive problem.

  Developers are very definitly going to have dot-files. .ssh

The article only mentions the system root directory, never the user's home folder. If you're storing your ssh keys in your system root directory, you're doing something very unusual.

Perhaps a bit pedantic (HN!) ... We may be remembering a different bug but wasn't the steam bug a failure to check that a variable existed before using it to complete a directory that was to be deleted.

The variable was empty when a user moved steamroot but that would have been fine with proper input checking - also there were probably other scenarios where that failure soul result in catastrophe too.

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/17/scary_code_of_the_week...

I'll be running chattr +i on my private keys when I get a chance. I wonder why that bit isn't set by default?

The Steam bug was the first thing that popped into my mind...But does application testing have to be so dependent on testers having all possible permutations of a system configuration? I mean, I can't offer a mathematical proof for this, but it seems to me possible to write code that pre-empts the situation where an arbitrary directory is blown away, willy-nilly. In the same way that while it's hard to effectively blacklist all the dangers, it's still possible to effectively implement security by whitelisting allowed behaviors.

For the Steam bug, it could have been fixed by running the shell script with options that prevent use of undefined variables.

It really isn't hard to have a company policy about nounset, errexit, and, in the extreme, noclobber.

Don't forget companies with a nolock policy.

What's nolock?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidlean/archive/2009/04/06/sql-ser...

That's exactly the point of application sand boxing, which Apple's been pushing for a while.

> Eh, I can kind of see how it might happen myself

Exactly! Any programmer worth their salt should be able to see how it might happen... and prevent it!

> you could have cutting edge testing following every industry best practice and still miss this bug

I disagree. If you are following industry best practice (checking files/directories before you delete them) you would not have this bug.

> It's easy to imagine how this sort of thing would happen - manual test guys don't have hidden folders in their root directories because their boxes are locked down by corporate IT and they can't create any folders in the root directory.

This is what QA is for. It should be thorough, more thorough than you imagine and performed by someone other than who wrote the code.