Adobe deactivates all Venezuelan accounts | Hacker News Reader

Adobe deactivates all Venezuelan accounts

helpx.adobe.com

998 pointssndpsy519 comments

What makes this even worse is that this is only a huge issue because Adobe moved to the whole 'Creative Cloud' thing rather than the old 'buy each product outright' model. With the old model, it wouldn't hurt these creators all that much if their accounts got deactivated, since the software would just not get updates.

Now on the other hand... they're screwed. It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user, because it puts them at the risk of getting locked out their own purchases due to legal hassles like this.

And if you've just paid your yearly prescription last week, you aren't even getting what you paid for:

> You’ve charged me, when will I get my refund?

>We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.

So no refunds either. Renting stuff in the cloud is just waiting to be screwed if the country you're in is on the hit list of the US government. And that's not a short list either, btw.

The website changed:

>If you purchased directly from Adobe, we will refund you by the end of the month for any paid, but unused services. We are working with our partners on the same.

I wonder what caused this. Did something important change, or did Adobe just overreact at first?

That's something credit card chargebacks can be used for, at least in the US.

This true. They have all discovered that the SaaS model is the best model for software sales —which is why the big players are all pushing everything into the SaaS model, which while convenient (financially and administratively), have drawback such as availability and of course the recurring nature of billing where you can’t choose to stay on an old version either because it’s good’nuff or because of compatibility reasons.

Yet, when google mail for business came out everyone hailed the idea; sigh... no more CALs, etc. which is true but now you have to pay recurringly (and msy have to keep former accounts live for compliance reasons)

> best model

I wonder how much recurring revenue Adobe just had wiped off their books.

What about when your government sanctions your biggest market?

Yeah, I got sick of Adobe's subscription model. Every release it seems like PS gets slower and slower without adding any features of value to me. I hate that if I want to have a certain combination of 2 or 3 apps I have to pay for basically everything which includes 80% of stuff I don't need. Paying $600/yr for something I only occasionally use a few times a month is a joke. I've since switched to Affinity.

Photoshop/Lightroom are $100/yr combined (sometimes less if you can get a deal on the subscription card). At that price, you're still looking at significantly less than if you used to upgrade your old software every 5 years.

Tell me about it. I use only Lightroom for my personal needs, but I need to pay for PS as well even if I’ve never used it. I contacted their support a couple time about that and the chat person always become silent at some point.

You get the subscription offered by Adobe for 30 if you cancel the subscription.

How do you like the competitor offering so far?

Funny enough, there is another issue with exactly this on another thread on the front page right now — Mac OS Catalina, which got released today, is killing the last remaining perpetual Adobe CS6 licenses available.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21184387

Bad day for Adobe. Or a good one? I'm not sure, but definitely an interesting one.

Good thing Microsoft is big on backwards compatibility. Hopefully CS6 will keep working on PCs for awhile longer. Sucks about Mac, though.

It also shows that Stallman was right from the beginning, it's just most people didn't believe such things could happen. The very basic right, the right to run the software, can be limited in an arbitrary way.

Honestly, it's not enough to just be able to run it. You need to be able to see it's source, and make modifications to it.

Not all software developers can handle all use cases that will be needed, and it's unrealistic to say, "if the use case is needed enough there would be market forces to implement it".

This comment says "Stallman was right" regarding the cloud. Not "Stallman was right about Marvin Minsky."

This is an argument people can't distinguish the man from the idea, or his software, or his organization, etc.

It’s own vs rent and the internet has enabled tech firms to operate as rent seekers. I personally think owning is the way to go for important things, but many people don’t see the distinction any more.

Hence the benefit of open source products. Imagine if everyone who bought a photoshop subscription supported some great open source software. They’d get dividends on their investment as equal owners of the software!

This is particularly brutal because for many Venezuelans, online freelancing work is their only way of accessing US dollars, which is their only way of accessing basic necessities. The quantities of dollars here are so low they would make your head hurt -- so places like Fiverr, while seeming like a place to do garbage work to someone in San Francisco, can be a near-literal lifeline to people with no access to other means of income. Fuck you Adobe

To be fair, and whether you agree with it or not, the point of the executive order was to screw them in this manner. So, it's a feature not a bug as far as the government is concerned.

That's parent's point. Cloud software puts you at the mercy of the vendor's government on an ongoing basis.

Cloud software has mostly been for the benefit of the company compared to the end-user.

Cloud software (especially iOS apps) has resulted in a huge decline in time I spend doing tech support for family/friends. It’s nice when stuff just works. Although, I agree, the subject of this thread is a huge drawback.

Exactly. People don't understand why I want to buy boxed software and deadwood books and have all my music downloaded (after legal purchase) only.

Well you can still buy downloadable DRM-free software and DRM-free (or DRM-freed :-P) ebooks just like your music (which i thin it is much easier and space effective).

That is what i do myself - i avoid anything with DRM (exceptions are some games that i wait for price drops to around the price of a coffee) and store everything on my external HDD.

Yeah, like how Microsoft's HUP program used to let me buy full offline office through work for $15. Awesome deal.

A few months ago they discontinued that model and now I can get Office 365 at a discounted annual price. The enraging part was the email where they spun it like this change was great for me and that HUP is way better than it was before. What a crock, SaaS for consumers is cancer.

Other little things too. A long standing bug/limitation of PowerPoint Mac is that you can't embed fonts in a presentation. So you literally can't create a presentation on a Mac and know that it will display correctly on another machine.

The ticket was closed as 'fixed/implemented' with the launch of the most recent version of Office - but you can only embed fonts if you have an Office 365 account.

Its becoming 'subscribe to unlock basic features'.

I agree with your core point, but I think it would be unfair to avoid noting some of the clear ways that SaaS has benefited users.

Accessibility: Individuals/businesses who couldn't afford a large, upfront expenditure for software but can afford the smaller, monthly expense now have access to the best tool for the job.

Flexibility: for sporadic consumers ("I use Photoshop/Illustrator once a year to make my Groundhog Day card"), the ability to subscribe for the one month of the year they use the product and subsequently cancel is incredible.

The only benefit is in their marketing department and Adobe's bottom line. If you wanted to use photoshop once a year, you could download the trial version. (Let alone that adobe's apps are no easy to learn toys - you can't just use them once a year). I 'll give it 1 year before we start looking back at SaaS as the abomination that it is.

The I use this software once a year use-case was handled with free trials.

For the limited number of companies who need to spread out a 1000 dollars or less over a year putting it on a credit card would be the cheaper option over the year.

The only groups that benefits is those who want to access the product from many locations/computers or the one who doesn't want to install anything.

Those are two big groups.

Yep, it's the flip side of the cloud coin: you're no longer in control [of the thing you just bought]. Average users don't fully appreciate the distinction, until events like this underscore it.

> Now on the other hand... they're screwed.

No, it just means adobe created a whole new fleet of pirates.

We should've listen to RMS about Free Software huh?

they're not screwed if they know how to use thepiratebay. this isn't a hard problem to solve for the technically competent.

am I being blithe about this? I don't think I am, but feel free to inform me if I'm missing something.

The issue now is everything associated with their "Creative Cloud" account; artwork layers saved to use throughout the programs, etc. – not as catastrophic as the update itself, but redundant for sure. Publicly, their Behance profile going down is probably where it hurts most.

And this is why I stopped using Adobe. Unfortunately, they've made so much more money milking their users than the customers they've lost so cloud stays.

Yes, we buy access only in many cases, not the actual product that can be used offline. You rent e-books, games, movies, songs, and even photos. In many cases if your account gets deactivated (please, do not assume that it will not, it can for arbitrary reasons, be it political or anything else), you will not be able to use the product. You cannot even play single player games without running Steam. Jeez.

Yep. I haven't upgraded since CS6. It still does everything I need it to do. I probably would have upgraded by now though if it was even possible to just buy a newer version, as there are some nice-to-have features the newer versions have. But at least I don't have to worry about dumb crap like this.

On the other hand if you wanted to get in the business as a freelancer you had to put all the money in upfront.

Being able to pay as you go with no long term commitments can be liberating as well.

So you might have both options...

But companies do not seem to realise this.

> It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user

It's a brilliant example of why proprietary software is bad for the user - how do users make sure their software doesn't have a kill switch? How do they ensure it doesn't phone home to validate their license?

not true, every adobe aplication have "portable" version and is installed on the host machine not cloud, they will loose cloud assets but apps will be fine

Or if the company goes bust or discontinues the product.

I mean these ‘cloud’ based services are also a good deal for users, too. Don’t overlook that.

Everything’s a trade off.

"It's a 'brilliant' example of how these 'cloud' based services are a bad deal for the user..."

I've understood the whole point with SaaS software is that corporate buyers prefer operational expenditure to capital expenditure. It's not about an evil plot to screw consumers more. It's a strategy to charge corporate clients in a way that they like.

I thought the point was that the software was already so good that people would want newer versions less and less, so they had to change the business model to get a steady revenue.

You are correct, but they force the same purchase type on all consumer, rather than let people decide.

Back in high school, my best friend wanted to have a legal copy of Photoshop (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then). He eventually found a copy of Photoshop 2 on eBay for cheap, got it and it's CD key and then purchased the upgrades to eventually get to Photoshop 5. I think he was able to pull it off for under $100 or pretty close (I think it retailed for like $300~$400 back then?).

I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium. Jetbrains at least allowed a fallback license, which Adobe doesn't have (and honestly that's because Jetbrains couldn't get away with that shit with a tech focused customer base).

Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

> I too miss when you owned a copy of the software, licensed to a single machine, that was on a physical transferable medium.

I only purchase music on CDs and vinyl. In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever, and even can sell the album if I tire of it.

Digital downloads are not that way at all and because of that I will never buy one. Likewise with ebooks.

I also will never personally purchase software on a subscription model.

Why are digital downloads not similarly 'forever'? Do WAVs and MP3s have DRM capabilities? Asking legitimately - for any new vinyl that I buy I use the download codes that come with albums rather than ripping them manually, as it's very convenient for e.g. listening at work.

There’s nothing wrong with digital music from a “keep it for life” perspective, as long as you’re on top of your backups.

WAV and MP3 do not have DRM capability. Even music purchased through iTunes has been available DRM-free for a decade [1].

For example, I’ve got a lot of albums, bought through Bandcamp, which I downloaded as FLAC and burned to CDs. Same quality as a retail CD, and no one can take it from me without physically stealing it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store#Digital_rights_ma...

In each case I legally have the right to listen to the music forever

In many jurisdictions, you still have that right. You just have no legal way to exercise that right.

This is not crippling any businesses in Venezuela. Anyone using Photoshop has already been pirating it because it's ludicrously expensive relative to local wages. They are instead being crippled by the barely functioning and heavily rationed power grid, food shortages, hyperinflation, etc.

If he bought it off eBay, it's not a legal copy in the USA. Software is licensed, not sold; and software licenses are nontransferrable.

That doesn't seem to be the case since 2009: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=148be5c9-c0d4... (or at least it was properly tested then)

Has anything changed since then? It seems Adobe CC was created not long after, so... maybe not a coincidence?

That decision was overturned on appeal. Vernor v. Autodesk was the specific case I had in mind.

Right of first sale overrides that, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Of course, the person selling the software would be in trouble if they put the physical media up for sale without deleting all local copies.

Vernor v. Autodesk essentially removed the right of first sale for shrink wrap licensed copywritten works.

Adobe licenses are transferable. Here is their support page for people who want to transfer software licenses from one person to another:

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/transfer-...

It might have been an unopened box... I did something similar with an old copy of Adobe Premiere that I got on clearance for a couple of bucks, then upgraded.

> (we were broke kids and pirated everything back then)

Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

> Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Do you understand what is going on here? Adobe is complying with a government order. And the government issued it in order to achieve an objective in a country where I believe (I only know what I see and read) there are significant problems.

> All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.

> Why brag or joke about that? And why does it matter if you were 'broke kids'?

You may have been reading too far into this. It sounds to me like a statement of fact, not a brag or a joke.

> Apparently they have no supplies in hospitals and rampant inflation. They have much bigger issue than piracy and malware.

Having a job is part of the solution, and the use of software is part of many jobs that have international value (i.e. from countries whose currency is not inflating rampantly).

Don't pretend like the US government has a good justification for this. It's purely another attempt to destabilize the country even more.

The entire purpose of these sort of sanctions is to hurt the public enough that they start putting pressure on their government to make a change that the sanctioning government wants. In this case the US wants Venezuela's government to be replaced with one who would be more friendly to US oil companies taking all of their oil and paying a small portion of it's value to the politicians who allowed them in.

The main reason Venezuela has been solvent up til now is that they have a lot of oil, which the government sells and uses to pay for social programs. But since the price of oil went down they've been having some money trouble. Combine that with the fact that Maduro knows as much about monetary policy as Trump knows about tariffs and you've got a deflating economy that's only made worse by sanctions, which again, is their entire purpose. They are specifically trying to ensure that Venezuela's government collapses so that US companies can move in and rob the region of it's resources.

Don't get me wrong, the best thing Venezuelans could do is probably throw Maduro out on his ass, but replacing him with some US-friendly bootlicker is worse than no solution.

As a Venezuelan I disagree, I can tell you that the people here dream of the day when a US military intervention takes place and the US(or really anyone not communist) take the country.

Worth noting that there's a decent alternative to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign from Affinity:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

Affinity is European, and thus not affected by the executive order. Also, all of their products are buy-once-own-forever.

And if you want an alternative to Adobe Premiere, I highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. Free for most features, then just a one off payment of $299. One of the industry leaders in colour grading and has a composition suite (acquired from DFX Fusion) built right in.

I started using Davinci Resolve a few years ago and its fantastic! It seemed too good to be true, and I kept waiting to find some dark secret or "catch" but nope, it's just really good software priced reasonably.

DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design. Such a pretty sounding set of names. It feels a lot more like the future I was hoping for.

I love Resolve/fusion, plus it has a Linux client

Thanks. I didn't know about DaVinci yet. It looks impressive (including their website).

Thanks for the hint! Any experience with high FPS footage? My old Premiere version I still have around works fine for regular 30/60 fps footage, but 240 FPS stuff it just can't handle properly.

Resolve is pretty nice. It still has 4k/HighDPI scaling issues (it's based on QT5 under the skin) that make things too large on some screens, but other than that it's pretty solid.

Yup. Davinci is what we use for our VR video production part.

Seconded, I am not at all knowledgable about video editing but had to do some stuff which was beyond the capabilities of iMovie and was impressed by Resolve. It’s fairly complex and the UI is pretty non-standard (true of many “creative”/media applications) but fairly logical and there’s loads of help online. Plus it’s free if you don’t need larger than 4K export!

I would love a real alternative to Lightroom. I'm stuck on version 6, since I refused to go to the rent it model.

I think Capture One Pro is superior to Lightroom in everything but the library system that is offered with Lightroom, though what is provided in Capture One Pro is still very good.

https://www.captureone.com/en/store

Same, recently heard about Darktable, planning to give it a shot now that I don't have Lighroom anymore

https://www.darktable.org

Affinity is "thinking about" a digital asset management tool.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when...

If they do make one, it may or may not have editing features built in (vs shipping you out to Affinity Photo).

But I'm in the same boat. Stuck on CS6, couldn't stand DarkTable, haven't bothered trying any other alternatives.

I recommend Luminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_83opqLxyU

I moved from Lightroom to Capture One Pro and eventually settled on Darktable.

It took a bit of getting used to (still not a fan of the UI and its obsession with "film rolls" every time I import something) but once I did it's quite nice. Images come out looking good and it has a handy Lua scripting environment and CLI with which you can automate many tasks.

There is https://rawtherapee.com/ and https://www.darktable.org/

Have you tried AfterShot Pro by Corel? I don't use it, but that's just because I still use (and love) Bibble 5 from 2011, which is the software that was bought by Corel and turned into AfterShot Pro. I had a quick glance at the manual of the latter, and it seems like the batch processing and other things are still intact, so I'm hopeful it still might be worth checking out.

I actually feel Adobe’s Photography Plan is pretty good value. LR Mobile on iPad is excellent, worth it for that alone

Have you tried ON1 Photo Raw?

Have you considered Polarr?

There's also a sale currently on Affinity Photo if you go to https://www.ephotozine.com/article/50--off-affinity-photo-so...

They usually do a black friday sale but you can get it here for half price.

Hmm. How good are they with the "grunt work" stuff for professional print design? Color profiles, PDF export, scripts for text formatting, files loading a gigabyte worth of photos, etc? I'm desperately waiting for a proper Adobe replacement but they're sitting on that segment, not with flashy, new features but with a solid-as-hell base of tried and tested background functionality.

Affinity convert on Windows here.

Profile support is fine, compatible with ICC profiles, does soft proofing and black point compensation. You'd have to go into more depth about your use cases as I know Adobe let some wild stuff happen, but if you just need to use and embed profiles and soft proof, you can do that.

Its PDF export is good, not great—again, Adobe allows for extreme granularity in PDF settings so I'd need to know specific use cases to advise. PDF import and placing PDF docs is surprisingly good, in some case shockingly so. If you're publishing books built from scratch in Affinity Publisher, there's nothing off the top of my head that I had to fundamentally change about my workflow in shipping 4-color books with layered artwork and columnar text with sidebars to prepress. If you're editing PDFs or converting from INDD, you can get away with a lot but you need to be careful since there are a few feature gaps (see the next paragraph in particular) that don't convert well or at all.

What you'll miss the most falls under what I think you mean by "scripts for text formatting". Publisher doesn't do grep styles or anything similar enough to replace that. It's the biggest feature I miss regularly. You'll miss the level of automation complexity and droplets in Photo too if you use those regularly in Photoshop.

I don't have any problems with large or complex layouts loading huge amounts of data for artwork, or massive text docs.

What I get that I didn't have in Adobe, and especially InDesign: pretty much full access from any of the component apps to vector drawing tools, raster and vector brushes, and shape tools, all of which behave consistently across the suite. No more having to flip my brain from Illustrator's vector drawing to Photoshop's to InDesign's, they all just work with each other and the same way, copy and paste across each other without any fuss, edit within each other easily when necessary, etc.

I miss some power features, especially around styles and Photo automation, but I've adapted, and I appreciate the hell out of how well-integrated the three apps are with each other in interface and functionality.

The forums are a good place to ask about or research feature implementations and requests, especially https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature...

Been using both designer and photo for about 2 years, to replace Photoshop mainly. While mostly great, some features are missing for vectors which makes layers broken down into tiny bits instead of groups.

The only way to solve it is to open the file in illustrator and save it as an .ai file to fix it. I've been told it works in Corel draw as well.

Not affected now, but being non-US is not a guarantee. Many European companies would like to trade with for example Iran, but can't since they also have a big market in the US, so they can be targeted.

If only it ran on Linux... I hate having to reboot to Windows to edit photos.

If you are on a desktop, you can dedicate a graphics card to windows and run it with PCIe pass through into a VM. Best of both worlds.

What's wrong with GIMP? Are there special abilities and features in Photoshop GIMP does not have?

I'm not sure how I haven't seen these before. Those apps look great! I've tried sketch, but it just feels too far from the adobe world I'm used to, especially for raster graphics work.

I own a copy, but it doesn’t handle plugins not nearly as nice as photoshop.

Have you tried Publisher? How does it compare to InDesign?

I bought it and use it, yes.

It's missing some features that InDesign has and is a little slower, but it's a solid workhorse for laying out books and documents. I don't miss InDesign at this point.

Disagree. Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator. I'm still on CS6, the last version before CC. Even that version, released in 2012, is superior to today's Affinity Designer.

I haven't explored the other ones as deeply but from what I have done, the features seem quite limited. For example, there's a translator for Photoshop plugins to work on Affinity Photo. Very very few plugins work with this translator. Why is there even such a middleware? Because the Affinity plugin ecosystem is very weak.

It's an alternative, not a "decent" alternative. It's the equivalent of Google Docs vs Microsoft Word. If you need something barebones, it gets the job done, and there are a few things it does better. But if you need just one feature of the better software, forget it.

I have Affinity Designer and Photo and disagree with your assessment. You're right that Affinity apps do not match all the features of Adobe's apps, but Designer and Photo are well above "bare bones" in comparison. I'd say that Photo's biggest missing feature is an equivalent to Photoshop's smart object feature.

As a former user of Illustrator, there's nothing I miss from that app, certainly not the clunky Illustrator UI. (Unfortunately, Designer also has some clunky aspects to it's UI.)

Anyone, who wants to make up their own mind about the Affinity apps can download a free trial from their website - the apps work on both Windows and Mac.

Also, take a look at the 'spotlight' section of the Affinity website to see some of the work possible with the apps.

https://affinityspotlight.com/articles/recent/

> Designer doesn't hold a candle to Illustrator

Where does it fall short for you? Out of interest.

https://www.gimp.org

https://inkscape.org

http://mypaint.org

https://krita.org/en/

https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/

https://kdenlive.org/en/

https://www.audacityteam.org

Inkscape is one of the best examples of open source done well (make sure to use the latest version if your distribution bundles an old one); even when I still had (pirated) versions of Adobe I preferred Inkscape over the Adobe offerings.

Audacity is another great program from experience, and the success of Blender speaks for itself.

Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare. There's a tutorial on how to draw a line, and you'll need it, because it requires a non-discoverable keyboard shortcut. Its feature set is either ages behind Photoshop, or there but non-discoverable due to bad UX, and the UX makes basic tasks excruciatingly painful.

Photoshop and IrfanView are the two tools I miss most from Windows, the latter even more than the former. Trivial tasks like "crop picture in clipboard and put it back on the clipboard/into a file" are pure pain on Linux, because the only thing that at least works reliably is Gimp with its horrible UX. One of the "lighter" (Paint.NET equivalent) tools left parts of its UI in my saved image. Others don't support the clipboard. IrfanView with Wine just isn't the same either.

> Gimp, on the other hand, is a UX nightmare.

I always wondered about Gimp. I use it all the time, but for VERY basic things. But anytime I want to do ANYTHING, even like just add a word to an image or draw a line, I need to go Google how to do it. The newest version seems better, but the UX is just crazy.

IrfanView is truly one of the greatest softwares ever. IMHO, it's the VLC for images.

Anything comparable on Linux?

With line breaks (ya gotta put two each):

https://www.gimp.org

https://inkscape.org

http://mypaint.org

https://krita.org/en/

https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/

https://kdenlive.org/en/

https://www.audacityteam.org

MyPaint is also an Amiga painting app for kids

https://archive.org/details/mypaint-cdtv

There's also a Sega CD version

I'm attempting to switch to many of these. Learning a new interface is a much bigger barrier to entry than the actual feature set.

I've been very impressed with the UI redo in Blender 2.8 I would love to see a similar rethink in a few of these other apps.

Yesterday I tried to apply a soundtrack to a video (cut video, cut audio, join together). Latest blender allowed me to add two sources to the timeline, but stutters and freezes killed my i7-8700, so I was unable to match timecodes or do anything. I could not even find play button to preview any sensible result. Resorted to cli ffmpeg -ss -t, which did it well.

I don’t know blender (nor any adobe video editing sw), but as a power user noob in it I expected at least something.

I've used Photoshop so much that the GIMP interface is unusable. It is close enough that I think I know what to do, and far enough that I am always wrong about what to actually do.

The executive order[1] targets the Government of Venezuela [2] not all Venezuelan companies and individuals. But I guess it's easier to deactivate everyone than try and verify if the account is related to the Government of Venezuela.

[1]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/... [2] the term ‘‘Government of Venezuela’’ includes the state and Government of Venezuela, any political subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including the Central Bank of Venezuela and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), any person owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the foregoing, and any person who has acted or purported to act directly or indirectly for or on behalf of, any of the foregoing, including as a member of the Maduro regime. For the purposes of section 2 of this order, the term ‘‘Government of Venezuela’

There are 2.8m[0] government employees out of a work force of 13m[1].. that's over 20% of the entire work force.

And that's just current active employees. From what you quoted, it includes past employees too.

They also own at least 500 companies that operate in a diverse number of industries[2]. And that wasn't found by disclosure from the government.. it required someone to research each of those companies. The actual count is almost certainly much higher. This is important because Adobe needs to know which of these companies are government owned, and the government does not make it easy to determine that. (I'm also not sure if employees of those are in the count above or not... I think not, except maybe the prominent ones like PDVSA.)

I think the fault here is Venezuela's... the government is so intermingled with the economy it's impossible for any reasonable person to determine where the government's reach ends.

0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-worker...

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/we-all-...

2. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...

USA total full time employees: 128.5 million. Total USA government employees (federal, state and local) 20~ million.*

I've seen stats from several countries and they varied from 15-40%. So 20% is not only relatively normal, it's on par with the USA's 17-18%.

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-ti... * https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/21955...

Wow, this is quite surprising to me that so much of the population is employed by governments.

thanks for the link, what about section 1.c

  The  prohibitions  in  subsections  (a)–(b)  of  this  
  section  apply  except  to  the  extent  provided  by  
  statutes,  or  in  regulations,  orders,  directives,  or  
  licenses  that  may  be  issued  pursuant  to  this  
  order,  and  notwithstanding  any  contract  entered  into  
  or  any  license  or  permit  granted  prior  to  the  
  effective date of this order.

> not all Venezuelan companies and individuals.

Er, given the structure of the socialist system in Venezuela, which companies or individuals can a US entity be sure are neither “owned or controlled, directly or indirectly” by the government or any instrumentality or agency thereof, including the central bank or national oil company, nor have ever acted directly or indirectly for or on behalf of any of those things?

What are the expected consequences for a private US firm applying the order too broadly? Too narrowly?

In Venezuela you never know, when a company is owned by the state. In the US, on the other hand, we know that the state is owned by the companies. Much easier this way.

> What are the expected consequences for a private US firm applying the order too broadly? Too narrowly?

Broadly, you lose customers. Narrowly, you’re fighting criminal charges for sanctions evasion.

And my music library slowly disappears from Apple Music (or Spotify) with every passing beat.

And my chat service (iMessage) won't let me talk with outside people... yes I know SMS still works.

And my photos slowly become fuzzy, surely this is a bug when it happens, right!?

And my backups are in proprietary encryption file systems. Well I changed that by moving off macOS at this point.

What's next, I don't even want to imagine anymore.

Along with the free software movement, I would be here with a movement that allows us to return to self-hosted, native and peer-to-peer services. There seem to be a smattering of them out there but they are disorganized and not united under one banner like FOSS is.

Without building and running your own full-blown PC at home, I think the best option is a consumer NAS. Which are great; I love mine.

But they don't seem to advertise and very few people know it's a really good option (with phone apps to replace the cloud ones, even).

The "Fediverse" is close, but I think we need to go a step further and build a community of self-hosted, peer-to-peer services. While federation is a great first step, it still requires _someone_ to manage a server of N users...

Your music library doesn’t disappear - if you bought music from iTunes. The music you bought would/could be on your computer. If you bought it within the last decade, it would be DRM free.

iTunes has had bugs that try to remove duplicates and end up deleting peoples' own remixed material.

Amazon discovered they didn't have the rights to a book in Canada and deleted it off people devices. The book? 1984.

I think the iTunes issues have been fixed, but it's still stupid to not have your own backup independent of stuff accessible by "cloud" services.

I buy everything I can off bandcamp and download it to my machine. I occasionally buy off Amazon music, but I really hate it when that's the only option an artists has and would prefer to buy/rip a physical CD at a show. I keep my music on a 512GB microSD card (crazy these things exist now) and I always keep my own backups of my own content; buy DRM free whenever I can on Gog/Humble over Steam.

I prefer to have things I own, not licenses to software and content that can be revoked at any time.

When I last installed itunes on a new computer, not all my past purchases showed up as available for download anymore.

I talked with support and they explained that as I had bought them when I was living in another country I could no longer download them.

Ah yes my music! You mean songs that have been overwritten by whatever match they decide is close enough (in some cases). Or you mean my music, that I've listened two maybe 200 times each. Or do you mean my music, that the artists themselves gave to me.

I don't much care for your argument, even if you're legally correct.

This would be less of an issue if the way people actually acquired music was still by buying the album, but that's not the case in the vast majority of people's experiences.

Don't forget no longer being able to watch your favourite movies, when the studios decide the service you subscribe to is no longer profitable for them.

If it has DRM, your mistake was thinking of it as a purchase rather than a rental.

Your books start disappearing from your ereader?

https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...

>And my photos slowly become fuzzy, surely this is a bug when it happens, right!?

What are you referring to here? The switch to retina display which makes all the old photos seem fuzzy if displayed at the same "resolution" ?

As unpopular as it is in general-subject tech forums, the solution is data stores that provide decentralization and censorship resistance through distributed consensus enabled by crypto-economics, namely the blockchain.

One day, the provision of every electronic service in the world could be coordinated in a censorship resistant manner on the blockchain. Before that happens, the cryptoasset/blockchain space's software suite needs to be improved, with solutions to problems like stolen and lost private keys, and scalability needs to improve a few orders of magnitude, but seeing all of the development on dApps and smart wallets, and all the work happening to enable layer 1 sharding and to develop layer 2 scalability mechanisms like zk roll-up, I suspect it's inevitable.

I think I agree with you, at least in principle. But there's a lot of ground to cover, and powerful forces who would like to remain in control, and new bad actors looking for new ways to gain control. Nothing's going to be as clean and easy as we'd like it to be :(

Why do you need consensus at all?

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Half of these aren't even problems?

Move on. It is just a popular rant.

>>We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.

this is ridiculous.. No refunds? if their cycle starts on 1st of Oct, they have paid for entire month(let alone annual subscriptions) but cant use any and cant get a refund..

Can we put this into perspective? The Venezuelan economy is in shambles, a hyperinflationary crisis that has forced millions out of the country as food is so scarce people are forced to eat zoo animals and pets. The government is illegitimate and destroying aid trucks trying to bring food and medical supplies to their people.

But here we are, complaining that the well-connected wealthy at the top of this mess can't get a refund for their purchase of Adobe Photoshop. Given that Maduro has nationalized nearly all of the major corporations in the nation, you necessarily can't be wealthy enough to own this software without being an open ally.

This action hurts people in that country, but it's supposed to hurt because until they get rid of their self-destructive government things won't begin to get better.

Being unable to get a refund for Photoshop is clearly not the biggest problem in Venezuela right now, but it's still a problem, and it's relevant to OP's link. We are allowed to talk about problems even if they're relatively small.

> But here we are, complaining that the well-connected wealthy at the top of this mess can't get a refund for their purchase of Adobe Photoshop.

I'd be more concerned that, e.g.,non-regime-aligned publishers can't continue using Creative Cloud that they've paid for than that anyone can't get a refund.

Yes the good 'ol "Their lives already suck, let's make it suck more until it stops sucking"

As far as I can tell this is a blanket generalization of Venezuelan Adobe account holders. Any student body, civil society NGO or independent media outlet that relies on registered copies of Photoshop, InDesign or Acrobat will be impacted.

The executive order is only against the government and their associates. Adobe has declined to put the effort into identifying which of their Venezuelan customers are covered by the sanctions.

Do note this is a complex issue, redolent with propaganda and outright lies.

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...

They should be trying to help Venezuela, not start more fires there.

The US government cares not.

I'd like to see what Adobe's plans are for the profits they receive in not refunding their clients (however small). A donation to a Venezuela emergency appeal would go down well.

Edit: deleted "Can't apologise after you drop a sales nuke" in favour of a more measured comment.

"A donation to a Venezuela emergency appeal would go down well."

Unfamiliar with these things, I read the executive order and was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is actually possible:

---

Sec. 5. Nothing in this order shall prohibit:

(b) transactions related to the provision of articles such as food, clothing, and medicine intended to be used to relieve human suffering.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/08/07/2019-17...

You can get a refund trough your credit card I guess.

Unless it was done via non american credit card (No Visa nor Mastercard) it’s no can do. They also lose their credit cards.

As a Venezuelan this is very scary. Not so much losing Adobe, as we can get around that, but the precedent it sets with other US companies.

Losing Twitter would be devastating, Venezuelans rely on Twitter to get their local news, it has effectively replaced traditional media as those have been taken over by the Government. People rely on networks of freelance journalists and smaller media companies to get what is happening locally. Losing Twitter would boost the Maduro regime.

Also, losing banking access (as it already happened with Transferwise) would plunge people further into poverty. A LOT of people rely on their friends and family abroad sending them money to survive, others work remotely for companies outside the country so they can earn in a foreign currency. A big part of the economy now functions via bank transfers abroad, you can literally buy in almost any shop now with a USD bank transfer. Losing that would wreck what's left of the economy.

Maduro must fall, but this will only empower him.

Do you live in Venezuela?

Not anymore but do visit often. My family is still there, though

Maduro must fall, Maduro must fall, blah blah blah blah https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido...

I can't imagine how many art/film creators just lost their current/future livelihood. This stymies the growth of so many individuals, some of whom may have eventually migrated to the U.S. and applied their extraordinary skills to support its economy.

Pirating looks like the only option, if that is even still possible with all of the features now tied to the cloud.

How many of them can actually buy a license with a national average salary of $17 a month?

This affects ALL of their products. Adobe has a huge suite of free/trial/student tiers as well, which also are rendered unavailable by this decision.

Depends how much CC costs in Venezuela - SaaS makes it a lot easier to have big geographic pricing differences.

This is a legitimate question. Even in developing countries that have much higher average income, paviating software is still super prevalent in commercial companies.

Many venezuelans work online because of this very issue. So, probably, many.

I think it's fair to say that people living in Venezuela have bigger problems than access to Adobe products.

They live in an extremely socialist country with crippling economic worldwide sanctions, massive inflation (300,000% or something like that). Their own money is worthless and most use US dollars to transact business.

Yeah, tell that to the freelancer who works from Maracaibo and uses US dollars to import the necessary stuff from Colombia, be it medicines or even food.

If I were venezuelan I'd just pirate the software and avoid this nonsense.

> You’ve charged me, when will I get my refund?

> We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc.

> (c) The prohibitions in subsections (a)–(b) of this section apply [...] notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the effective date of this order.

Page 1 of https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

Kinda seems like there's no excuse for going about it this way.

well that's convenient for adobe's bottom line

Sure, today. I think Adobe would have preferred to get their continued monthly revenue from those users in the long run. I don't think they're quoting the law here because it benefits them.

Presumably, if they had Venezuelan accounts-receivable, they would no longer be allowed to collect on them, either.

Some days ago a big discussion here in HN was about FCPA preventing American companies overseas. Well, you don't need to be corrupt if your government always do the dirty work for you.

chargeback?

Adobe is presumably using American banks. Those banks are bound by the same(if not more strict) rules that Adobe is, likely Adobes customers are just screwed out of the money unless the US solves this dispute. Hopefully this drives up adoption of other FOSS graphical processing programs like GIMP/Glimpse, Krita, InkScape, etc

If I were a foreign company, stories like this would make me hesitant to do business with American software business. Granted, many of you have pointed out that Adobe's model (Creative Cloud) is a contributing factor to the degree this is harmful, but the driving force here is still American policy.

> American policy

And… which other government has never made a surprising decision?

Except the US government doesn’t massively run on Indian or German software.

I imagine the day Microsoft is dragged into this. Even with the current version or windows/office/exchange server/sharepoint still running “offline”, imagine not getting security updates, no support, no additional support anymore.

In a way this is a threat that always existed, and many govs have tried serveral attempts to get away from MS and other foreign companies, but up until now the threat was hypothetic, and the cost seemed tremendous in comparison. But not anymore I guess.

The difference is other governments can't enforce things like the US can.

The world runs on oil, oil is priced in USD. USD are controlled by the USA. Aside from the USA controlling much of the internet and much of the worlds seas.

Thats a fair rebuttal. I suppose the crux of the matter is the strength of relations between two countries when making the decision to purchase software from a foreign company.

Wow... this is a completely bullshit maneuver by the U.S. gov that will certainly make anyone anywhere outside the U.S hesitant to purchase from Adobe.

Aside from that, the only reason our Gov meddles with Venezuela is they have so much oil. We wouldn't care what their gov did if they paid our US oil corporations a cash tribute for every barrel pumped and sold.

Dragging Adobe into that this way is a frightening precedent that may well come back to bite us all in the ass here in the U.S.

Wow, I bet Venezuela wishes as a country that they did not announce the intention to sell oil in any currency. No one, apparently, is allowed to stop using the US dollar as the reserve currency.

As a reminder: early in George W Bush’s presidency, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia all announced that they would sell oil in any currency and almost immediately they were labeled “axis of evil.”

We in the USA benefit from owning the reserve currency it I am always surprised at how long we have kept this advantage.

GWB's "axis of evil" was Iran, Iraq and North Korea, not the countries you mentioned.

Libya got destroyed when they wanted gold for oil. At least China has established yuan for oil for their trade with Russia.

> I am always surprised at how long we have kept this advantage.

With the amount spent with US Military (more than all the next 9 countries combined), not surprised. Military bases everywhere, wars everywhere etc.

I am confused. Executive Order 13884 concerns only the government of Venezuela & about 150 specific people/companies in Venezuela. Am I misreading this order or did Adobe?

PDF: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

Probably, it is easier and safer for them to ban Venezuela completely, than to determine whether or not one of their customers is one of those 150.

But, they don't want to say that. They want to blame it all on the government.

A lot of companies do this. Claim that their own business decisions about how to implement government regulations were forced by the government, when in truth it is their own commercial decisions around cost of compliance and risk appetite which were determinative, not the government regulation alone.

I mean, what do you expect them to do? If it costs them more to serve a country than business from the country is worth due to regulations, do you expect them to keep serving the country at a loss? Is the regulation somehow not at fault? It's not like Adobe wants to stop taking people's money in exchange for the service.

> Any person owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the foregoing

Seems like not much of a stretch to consider all citizens controlled by the Gov.

It's not a huge deal if this only blocks people from accessing Adobe Creative Cloud.

But this essentially blocks people who have purchased content from hundreds of other parties. Adobe is the global guardian of most of the DRM-ed ebook ecosystem, controlling everything that's not Amazon or Apple.

What happens if a person has bought hundreds of Adobe DRM-ed ebooks from random bookstores? They can't access _any_ of their legally purchased material? Them reading is now illegal?

This is shitty situation we have cornered ourselves into. The global digital ecosystem put it's entire trust into American companies, and it's slowly reaping what it sowed.

This is a good time as any to link to [Defective by Design](1)

[1] https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

> It's not a huge deal if this only blocks people from accessing Adobe Creative Cloud.

It is a huge deal, as remarked elsewhere in the thread, because given Adobe's near-monopoly on the graphics design market, this essentially kills several industries in the country.

I misspoke, I did not mean that as a whole, I only meant that in terms of the availability of legal and libre alternatives for that market (they may not be as convenient to use or available in a single package, but allow you to create roughly the same things).

For books, you have _no_ legal way of reading those books.

Even books by legendary freedom icons are not available DRM-Free. I encountered multiple times, last time was after spending hours while trying to purchase a certain book by an infamous author. No seller had this book available DRM-Free.

It's insane that knowledge is locked behind whether a single corporation decides you're worthy of reading or not.

* Situation in public libraries is not much better with OverDrive/Adobe being the legal overlords and guardians of the entire global market.

Good example why apps or games "in the cloud" is not a good idea. There is Photoshop portable, plus CS6 suite still works offline.

Yeah, I've worked on several video games that only exist on probably a handful of individual's Wiis (WiiWare) or old iPhones, or maybe in a torrent somewhere now. And yet I worked on a Playstation Portable game that you can still get from eBay for pretty cheap, over a decade after the company shut down.

I'm no longer a big fan of games just being in the cloud, or even the rights not being freed up once the company dissolves.

This is true for photoshop, but for any other piece of software (le’ts say Outlook), just not getting security updates would be a huge deal.

Also I wonder if DRM servers stay available in this case. If not, it could stop any new installs, or stop existing instances from running when the current token is expired.

You could have a perpetual license to content that is hosted in the cloud by one or more providers.

That perpetual license would mean bunk if you're suddenly prohibited from accessing that content (or more specifically: a provider is prohibited from allowing you to access that content) by an Executive Order.

Not sure if I get what you're saying. How can the consumer have that?

BTW sanctions like this seem to be a good thing for the free software world. As soon as sanctions (even though much more moderate) have been deployed against Russia it has started an extensive campaign to replace commercial software with free alternatives in many places. E.g. many PostgreSQL jobs have emerged as well as some traction in ditching MS Office for LibreOffce. Most of the people still use pirated software there (and, I believe, in Venezuela as well) but as free software matures people are turning to it instead.

I recently had PayPal disable my merchant account because I logged in funny (I was on a trip and something was tripped because of the different login region), and now this news. The world has become way too centralized, we should start favoring the old models (pay for something and use it forever, no phoning home, etc).

Luckily, there are some great alternatives in this particular space (Affinity Photo, DaVinci Resolve, etc), and others (e.g. GOG for games). Hopefully, if we support those monetization models, others will follow suit.

Coincidentally, since I'm not sure I'll be able to ever get my PayPal account back (I can't prove the physical address since the company hasn't been there for a while), does anyone know of a good cryptocurrency payment processor?

It is terrifying the amount of power Adobe have to lock the human population out of their work. I don't understand how companies don't see this as a huge liability to their large volume of assets kept in Adobe formats.

There are quite a few 3rd party apps that can open PSD format files.

I'd be more concerned about other SaaS companies. For example: using Google's GSuite for e-mail and all document storage. Or imagine using Okta / Onelogin for company-wide user management and having all your user accounts disappear. Or a VOIP provider and having none if your phones work.

From a comment on reddit: "los narcos ya no podrán usar photoshop" (now the narcos can't use photoshop).

https://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comments/den9r5/adobe_cierra_o...

Mind you, the biggest producer and seller of drugs in South America is still the longtime partner (or vassal) of America: Colombia.

I think they may have meant the narcotics police.

They are pretty laughing about the situation, but some of them seem to be not happy with it.

It'll be interesting to see if Adobe is subject to and loses lawsuits outside of the US for this. (And perhaps in the US too, considering Section 1(c) of the order specifically says it doesn't apply to any contract or license that predated the order)

Presumably they have a lot of assets outside of the US which could be taken to recoup losses here.

Adobe is an unethical company that should have had its charter revoked almost a decade ago ago for its participation in the multi-billion dollar unlawful wage fixing scheme. It's hard to feel bad on Adobe's behalf for difficult situation created by the confluence of their user-hostile licensing practices and US foreign policy.

Wage fixing scheme?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

There are a lot of design companies running CS4 (the last DVD based software) on El Capitain, the last version of the Mac OS that runs it. Adobe make efforts to render the serial number checks a problem, particularly for CS3, to encourage upgrades to their rental model. The era of students learning on pirated Adobe products and 'growing' into consumers of their products is over though. I really miss the Kai's Power Tools era when Adobe was an interesting and innovative platform company http://kai.sub.blue

The executive order they reference seems to prohibit giving money or stuff to the Venezuelan government or those associated with it.

Where does it prohibit trading with individuals and businesses that aren't affiliated with the government?

If Adobe is just stopping everything as it's hard to know if someone is affiliated with the government, then that seems like a reasonable choice. But then if you're just random individual they're refusing to give you a refund when there's no law stopping them.

If I've understood things correctly, then they're refusing refunds to people who are entitled to them.

Adobe missed a huge opportunity to 'fail safe' and provide their products free to existing customers in Venezuela. They have the IP range... just whitelist them and declare their accounts free.

Their message said they're not providing access to free services either, though I don't know if that's because they _can't_ or because they won't for some reason.

Transferwise has also announced today via email that the will not longer offer their services.

https://i.redd.it/jxqfc4c1z4r31.png

The lesson is not to trust any US or foreign based cloud service .. they can arbitrarily suspend your data and service at whims of politicians.

Host it yourself or with a local service provider in your own country.

All this is going to do is push Venezuelan users to pirate the software, through torrents or other means. This actually would provide some economic benefit to Adobe. At least some of the Venezuelan users that pirate their tools will wind up collaborating with users in countries where Adobe can charge. Ultimately that will result in Adobe making more money than they would if the tools simply ceased to exist entirely in Venezuela.

> We apologize for the inconvenience.

That's all you get after paying hundreds, or thousands, for a 'cloud' service that used to be standalone software.

Of course no one is using paid software in countries like this. Why would they? I saw big render farms in Russia with multimillion dollar turnover that use Adobe products downloaded from torrents. I had a client who had massive rendering needs, and AfterEffects license prohibits renders for other people so i asked them how do they go about licensing, they basically didn't understand my question. After some emails exchange, it boiled down to 'maybe that is a concern for Americans, but we are a Russian company and we're in Russia, so you can be rest assured you won't have a problem if you just offload your client's workload to us'. They were most probably right, while i didn't dare to try. None of their previous clients even asked about that. And you are speaking of Venezuela.

People outside of the Western states don't buy software. They don't need to. And their culture is strongly against it (someone who buys something he could safely steal instead, is seen as a loser in Russia).

Adobe is not a nice company. In my country subscriptions can never last more than a year, after that you get the right to cancel every month. I took me 25 min and speaking to many Indian help-desk engineers in English before I could cancel my account. For me that was not a problem but many dutch people don't even speak English.

I just read the executive order. For a programmer, I think I'm pretty good at reading government-ese, but wow! given the words in the order, I'm not quite sure how that translates into Adobe not being able to offer their cloud.

Can anyone with more experience translate the order?

Part of this is a direct result of the relentless move to annoying "cloud" only apps, but the other part is the "we reserve the right to discontinue your account at any time for any reason" T&Cs that all these apps come with. Especially when in conjunction with patents that cover the novel concept of file formats.

More broadly there's a long term cost inflicted by the US gov on US companies - as time goes by this is going to discourage purchasing US software, especially that backed by cloud services. I mean take any of that software that isn't "cloud" software, but does use remote DRM enforcement - should those "can I use this software" servers also start rejecting connections from Venezuela or what have you?

How does this actually fit with what the order says. It's supposed to affect people working with the regime, not tens of millions of people. Is this Adobe just trying to say "fuck you" to a whole country, or are their lawyers just really confused (or am I?)?

Creative Cloud apps only need to phone home for activation monthly (at least it was that way early last year). Impacted users just need to get a new Adobe ID and purchase a prepaid 1 yr sub to their apps using a Gmail address and VPN (if Adobe is checking IP). Then just get on a VPN once a month to let it phone home and otherwise block internet access for those apps.

Also, it's possible that the activation servers don't even check IP. Companies just don't want to get fined by the govt. There's no incentive for them to go beyond the letter of law in checking. It may be as simple as saying you're somewhere else when signing up.

Similar to how Adobe decided to ban users from Venezuela from using their software, Oracle has now canceled contracts with partners in Venezuela due to Executive Order 13884. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/oracle-cancel...

Yay for cloud computing: no cookie for you today coz we don't like you no more.

Talking about a subscription model, my ideal music streaming subscription would be:

1) Pay a fixed amount per month (like Spotify, Apple Music, et al.).

2) Take your amount of seconds listened and divide accross the artists you listened to (unlike Spotify et al.; they pool all plays across all subscribers).

3) No free tier. Nada.

4) Maybe get special offers on live events and merchandise. The artists will be making their money there; live performances is what brings home the bacon. But at least, unlike Spotify et al., if you listen to only one song the whole month then that artist gets your full $5 and not Justina Biebergrande.

And that's it.

Welp, time to pirate Photoshop

The problem is finding a version that doesn't have malware in it. Or, so I've heard.

A few years ago, when Adobe shut down the licensing servers for CS2 it posted direct links to "officially cracked" versions with serials on its site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20161009002305/https://helpx.adob...

(View source or disable CSS if the scripting is funny, and you'll see the loot.)

The "best" method is to download the actual software through adobe cloud, and then use the dll method - that way you're using a single dll that's more easily verifiable and from a "trustworthy" source, instead the entire application. (You're still crossing your fingers for no viruses of course).

Of course this method won't work if you can't access it in the first place....

I've wondered about this. For the past 10 years, I've worked for various companies that have purchased licenses for me. I was certain there were still torrents out there, even though the actual programs are "rentables". But that whole scene is just a crypto-mining nightmare, I've heard.

There is a pretty well established delivery system for those.

Keep in mind Adobe owns many other companies and brands

How does this affect Magento for example?

Well, if the people don't even get a refund for what they already paid for, I guess that gives them moral right not to respect any intellectual property of Adobe either, just pirate anything they need.

To think that someday Facebook, Google, Apple etc could also just deactivate all accounts from a specific country, leading to people losing access to everything they do on any connected computing device...

Why does CC need to do this, but Office 365 and G Suite don't?

Live by the cloud, die by the cloud

Another good reason to avoid any business with companies vrom the USA as long as politics are done by rolling a dice and then twittering about the result.

So "we're cancelling your account and not giving you a refund for what you've paid for and we're not providing"

Seems pretty immoral if you ask me

This couldn't happen to any/all software vendors/clients using Apple's notarization service and various app store models, surely!?

Heavens to Murgatroyd.

Can anyone weigh in on why they could not just move these subscriptions to a non-US Adobe entity and continue to transact accordingly?

For those that are looking for an alternative, humble bundle have a bundle right now which includes paintshop pro ultimate among other comparable adobe products.

See: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/painter-create-with-co...

My relationship with Adobe went from love to hate when they bought up Macromedia and stopped developing FreeHand in 2003. I'm still using it and won't ever pay for any of their other products. Venezuelans will just have to give up cloud and Adobe can't do much about anything else.

This is a wholly toxic situation for companies anywhere thinking of buying US connected software where the person lives in a country that might at any point become persona non grata in the US and put on some embargo list.

Safe prediction is that in the future no software or technology purchased will have its origin in the US.

I wonder if there are any other companies/services that are in the same boat and have to do this as well.

A better question might be: how many companies actually know about this executive order? It took effect August 5, but Adobe is just now taking action on it. I'm pretty sure the company I work for has both free and paid Venezuelan customers and we (afaik) haven't cut off business with them.

It applies to all of the United States.

"Sec. 3. The prohibitions in section 1 of this order include: (a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and (b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person"

What it shows is that it's risky to rely on a "cloud"/subscription service offered by a company from a different jurisdiction. In particular, if the service provider is a US company, it's a red flag. If it's Chinese, it's a red flag too.

Adobe lost me as a customer when they started renting software. I won't run any software on my machine that has a remote kill switch. This is yet another example of why Adobe's business model is bad for consumers and great for Adobe's competitors.

Couldn't Adobe take this to court? I thought executive orders were subject to the same judicial process as legislation. It's seems to me the smart move would be to exhaust legal avenues before shafting legitimate customers.

> Couldn't Adobe take this to court?

Sure, they can take anything to court. The question is can they expect to win, such that their failure to comply would not have massive adverse consequences.

Executive orders imposing sanctions under the same provision of law this order relies on are not uncommon and have been litigated. What novel challenge does Adobe have that makes it worthwhile to fight this one?

> It's seems to me the smart move would be to exhaust legal avenues before shafting legitimate customers.

Not taking immediate action to comply, whether or not they are also challenging the order at the same time, risks criminal prosecution of both the company and the individuals involved.

And when the government seizes their license servers as part of that criminal prosecution, a whole lot more “legitimate customers” are screwed.

This will just teach all Venezuelans that want to use adobe software how to pirate it.

If there is a silver lining in this, it is that it is probably good for open source development. But since I am not a graphics guy, I don't know much about the state of open source image manipulation software.

It seems strange to issue an executive order that would cover ... Photoshop or something.

I could see a given country limiting some specific things but something so broad, I don't know what value that is.

Some zombie bloatware vendors back from the iphone dead kick some poor people who live in a wrongful place to teach them a lesson. Yay. way to go. we are all so much better off for sure.

I wonder if GIMP's servers are seeing an uptick in traffic?

"We are unable to issue refunds. Executive order 13884, orders the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc."

Harsh.

as a member of 3rd rebellious country with an actual questionable human rights / economic policy i.e Zimbabwe. These things frighten me. Also I wonder why other economically powerful zones such as Europe / Asia don't produce quality software to compete with Americans. seems software talent is everywhere. & will likely be affected by the US's quasi political pettiness. hey i'm working as software engineer here in the US .

I wonder if Adobe is prepared for other nations on less than friendly terms with the US to start some probing around the Adobe perimeter.

What makes you think they're not already doing that? It's not like Adobe is flying under anyone's radar.

Because there's now a compelling, specific reason to. I imagine the DPRK started new activity with Sony after hearing about "The Interview".

Deadline is 28th of october. Did they decide to not refund affected users before the deadline or are they just not allowed to?

Now opponents of the regime in Venezuela won't be able to use Adobe tools to create anti government material.

Nice move, United States.

Talk about kicking a dog when it's down - wtf has this to do with helping the Venezuelan people? Unemployment and inflation is sky high so let's make it even worse for everyone by wiping out as many of the companies still surviving as we can. Great policies Donald. Every day you somehow manage to surpass your prior level of cluelessness.

I noticed adobe was spamming reddit with ads today on reddit.

never saw a single ad from them before there

Adobe is complying with an Executive Order. Why are you all picking on Adobe?

so they're forcing people to pirate their software? interesting

It seems it's not their decision, but US government's decision here.

Is Google going to deactivate all Venezuelan accounts? Facebook?

Let this be a lesson in the political implications of relying on cloud/SaaS. Centralised, remote services also represent a centralised, remote single point of control. That has implications not only for data security but also for denial of service on political grounds as Trump has now demonstrated.

I guess Autodesk and then PTC Creo and then maybe Solidworks.

Oh shi.. Does that mean that if the little yellow man decides, Valve could disable off all EU steam accounts? That's pretty insane, coming from "the land of the free" :s

AS if venezuela can't figure out a vpn. sigh

What about Google and other cloud services&

Think of it as Evolution In Action

It's interesting that we spend our outrage at companies that are following the directives of our governments.

I didn't see any outrage when these sanctions were put in place. Certainly not on HN.

If you think about it, we're outsourcing the job of fighting for our rights to these companies. And they mostly only care about profits in our capitalist system.

Should we be putting all these pressures on such biased proxies? Is this the new norm?

All due to unmatched wisdom.

/r/StallmanWasRight

Time to buy Affinity Stock.

buys stock in gimp

On one level I'm absolutely outraged by this, but the thing is it's not Adobe's fault and, to be honest, there's probably not a lot else they can do under the circumstances. The fault lies with the Trump administration and unless and until they change their position nothing will change.

Rightwing conservative capitalist here. This imperialistic US foreign policy is so destructive and so unfair. Sanctions and trade embargoes are an act of war, yet if Iran or Venezuela responds, the US declares it an attack and feels justified to impose even harder sanctions or perhaps to invade.

So Apple hides a Taiwan flag and HN thinks the Software Engineer should have done something, they should rebel and fight against oppression of the Chinese government.

Imagine my surprise here seeing so many people supporting Adobe.

HN isn’t a single person. There’s always a variety of opinions. It’s too easy to find contradictions between two different threads for this to be a helpful critique.

Nor does everyone here feel the need to take strong political stands on a hacker forum. So it’s a tough thing to gauge.

People always hold Apple to a different standard.

An issue where you are able to view contacts on an iPhone without entering the passcode is an unmitigated civilization ender, while no one cares that many Android phones don’t get any security updates for a large part of their typical lifespan.

See also the stories about working conditions in the ‘Apple factories’, which really are Foxconn factories that build hardware for just about any major manufacturer.

One involves breaking U.S. law, one doesn't. Completely different situations considering Adobe/Apple are U.S. based.

Considering almost no one is, and the typical "there is more than one person here" argument.

wow no refunds either? good deal for adobe :(

I've quit Adobe when they moved to the cloud, what a horrible scheme. Now I'm using Inkscape already for years for all my digital graphics work. It's not on par with Illustrator, but still an amazing open source project we should cherish.

Richard Stallman was right.

Specifically (for the benefit of those who've flagged the above comment to death), Stallman and the FSF have opposed the proliferation of DRM and SaaS for this exact reason: because a company can - for any reason - pull the plug on the software for which you've paid.

There are free-as-in-free-speech alternatives to most (if not all) of Adobe's software products. If they're "not good enough", then it's in our best interests to fix that, whether by contributing code to the existing replacements or creating new ones (perhaps forked from the existing ones). In the meantime, even if they're "not good enough", at least they can be used, unlike Adobe's "good enough" tools, so perhaps setting aside those issues in favor of tools that get you most of the way there without the potential to suddenly disappear from you with zero recourse would be prudent?

> Take about crippling certain business in Venezuela. All this is going to do is encourage piracy (and potentially malware).

Adobe doesn't really have a choice here. They're doing this to comply with sanctions, not because they have any dog in fighting Maduro.

If Venezuelans pirate Photoshop, then Adobe can go and say "hey, these people are using it without our permission, which means we're still in compliance".

Adobe had a choice, and opted for the one where a single point of failure could cripple an entire nation of users.

"Failure" in this case is legal, not technical (distinction without a difference to users).

Their interpretation of the sanctions is wrong.

Individual creators cannot be presumed to be in business with the government. The sanctions only concern people doing business with the government.

Adobe's lawyers are idiots and just screwed over a bunch of people.

Don't buy cloud shit.

> Adobe doesn't really have a choice here. They're doing this to comply with sanctions, not because they have any dog in fighting Maduro.

Adobe had a choice when they chose to stop selling software in favor of cloud services. This is a perfect illustration of why that choice was anti-consumer. It shouldn't be possible to revoke access to software functions that don't fundamentally require remote server support.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21185298.

They don't need to pirate. Adobe has been giving away photoshop 2 for awhile now.

> Adobe doesn't really have a choice here.

The problem is this seriously undermines their business model in most of the world which the US may in the short term decide to levy sanctions against as part of its bullying process. Venezuela and Syria have never harmed the US or threatened us in any way whatsoever, yet find themselves on our "shit list". Turkey may soon be there as well, and they are a member of the EU. Who knows which EU nation may be next.

If you buy US software it's not yours and we can take it from you at any moment.

Who wants that sort of software upon which their data depends?

Not a single person in the world with the least bit of sense.

Adobe should fight this as it undermines their business model.

That they are cowards who choose not to means they get what they deserve.

This is truly unconscionable.

Nice reminder to us non-Americans, that we essentially live in digital colonial era, where our livelihoods can be effed up at one strike of signature.

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