Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Annals of Adobe evil - writing into track 0

I found this occult discussion when searching about encyrption utilities (TrueCrypt in this case) and drive repair (Spinrite) ...

STEVE [GIBSON]: It turns out that another Adobe utility - I don't know what it is with Adobe and track 0. But it turns out that he's learned that their acrotray.exe utility, which is some sort of something that lives down in the tray of Windows, is also writing into track 0 and wiped out TrueCrypt. He rebooted, and he typed in his password. Nothing happened. And he said he saw his life pass before his eyes. Then he realized, wait a minute, I've got that CD. So he booted from the CD. It was able to, of course, restore that track and the boot track, and he was able to get back into Windows. And again, by juggling back and forth a little bit, he figured out what it was that was causing the problem. And so this is two different things now from Adobe relative to, I guess to Macromedia. Or I think Macromedia was the other one. And so it's something DRMish that Adobe is doing is really causing problems. And he did do some browsing around and confirmed that lots of other people are having the same problem with Adobe's software and its collision with the TrueCrypt bootloader.
Writing to track 0 as part of a DRM process is really nasty.

This is the sort of thing that makes geeks want Adobe to go away.

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