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Adobe is the company who once thought modifying the boot sector of a hard drive was OK [1].

I'm just glad they didn't migrate to messing around with EFI variables for their copy protection.

1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/441941/...

FWIW FlexNet is not an Adobe product, it's by Flexera[0] (Acresso at the time, prior owner Macrovision). It is/was used by a lot of products for license enforcement. I wasn't personally aware of the boot sector crap until now though.

Doesn't really excuse Adobe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher

I've implemented FlexNet licensing in some of our software and my first thought when I read about this adobe bug was that it was an error in the FlexNet licensing implementation since it likes to just own a folder and wipe its contents before refreshing licensing info from the server (which would make sense after an install/update).

The only thing I could find from Adobe was the basic release notes, which really don't say much. Has anyone seen more details on how this happened? If it is licensing, I doubt they'd admit it.

Messing around in /? Pretty certain it is licensing, putting information in obscure places most users won't look for them.

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