Adobe deactivates all Venezuelan accounts
helpx.adobe.com
helpx.adobe.com
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.
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 is an argument people can't distinguish the man from the idea, or his software, or his organization, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909030
I don't find anything objectionable about Stallman's opinions here either. Quite the contrary in fact.
I don't know how the people who caused this can look at their reflection in the mirror with a straight face.
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.
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)
I wonder how much recurring revenue Adobe just had wiped off their books.
What about when your government sanctions your biggest market?
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.
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.
Photo imports (and exports) to PSD file format.
Some Photoshop features that aren't available in Photo (e.g. smart objects) won't be editable in the same way when opening a PSD in Photo, but you'll still be able to open the PSD file.
If you have a lot of Illustrator and Photoshop files, best to try them out in the Affinity apps to see if you're happy with the import feature.
Sketch, Designer, etc, are all pretty crippled when it comes to working with groups instead of layers. Many people have asked for group isolation mode in Designer for years, but it's not really a priority for Serif.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...
I tried developing a script for Sketch but the SDK doesn't provide the needed API to implement it properly and quite frankly Sketch is super slow once you work on complex projects.
The only software I've found that does groups well is a little software called Amadine, but it's still not very mature.
The team that develops PixelMator promised a vectors graphics software but are too busy with PixelMator Pro.
I haven't used Corel Draw in almost 20 years but now that they have a mac verson I will give it a try.
Affinity Photo is a great replacement for Photoshop though.
There isn't any good constraint based / procedural vector software. Best I've able to find for my needs is Fusion 360 but it's really for 3D not for 2D. I want things to reflow automatically based on parameterized constraints and nothing does that except for Fusion 360 and/or OpenSCAD but those are both horrible for 2D vector.
I've even resorted to use React and SVG to dynamically generate vectored laser cut designs. https://github.com/brennancheung/lasercut-react-svg/blob/mas...
If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them.
Can you expand on that?
You mean like having a UI solver for drawing gears?
Other times there is constraint based solving going on. And other times there are simple formulae based on the dimensions of other vectors (think spreadsheet style reactive).
I recently got a new ipad pro and got this app sketchr3d and I was blown away by how intuitive it is to design really sophisticated structures. I tried blender on and off like 4 times over 5 years and found it basically impossible to use.
After making some really cool designs in s3d I started to wonder how easy it is to just print it with some kind of decent 3d printer model.
Is it really plug and play/drag and drop your file?
Other than that, there’s likely a bunch of parameters that control the actual printing process— there are a lot of tradeoffs to make between print speed, material usage, part strength, etc. The printer software will ask you about these before starting a print.
Not quite. The STL is the model. A slicer “slices” the model into tens to thousands of layers and creates a GCode file that tells the printer exactly what to do.
As sibling comment says, the design is saved as an STL file, a format they all use, which basically describes the shape of your print in a (variabally sized) load of triangles.
However, most use 'slicer' software on the computer as an intermediate step between the STL export from whatever CAD software your using before actually sending (specific instructions for your model) to the printer.
So, if you wanted to print directly from an iPad, my guess is that you'd need a model of printer that 'slices' STL itself, without desktop software. Even then, you'd probably need (a Lightning <-> USB adapter and) a USB drive to actually get the file from iPad to printer.
I personally use Inventor, and there's a nice easy way to convert to STL's in the application.
You then take your slicer of choice (Cura is popular) and toss the STL in there, and click print.
Pretty close to plug & play.
I've setup everything once about 2 years ago, and should probably update the toolchain (klipper is awesome).
E.g. I could: Draw 2D plane 10x10 mm; extrude; on one surface, create a diagonal helper line; put three circles on that line; define diameter of one circle to be 2.5mm; constraint diameter of the other circles to be equal to the first; split the helper line at every circle intersection; constrain all line segments to be equally long - now all things are fully constrained. Negative extrude the circles (e.g. make holes into the first volume).
Should produce something like this:
*---*
|o |
| o |
| o|
*---*
I made a video about it here.
Going from vector graphics to laser cut product is fucking painful when the design isn’t simple.
Parameterised constrains with sub-millimetre precision in a vector graphics app is the holy grail.
I do my designs in qcad, submit as a vector PDF, and the laser guys get that into Corel somehow. There might be some trickiness to the conversion due to how curves are represented in the PDFs? Maybe not. All I know is my parts come out fine.
I believe some people use Inkscape, but I found it unusably clunky. YMMV.
One can also do cross-object relationships using mathematical expressions. This can also be used to make eerything can driven form a single spreadsheet of input values.
Note that in FreeCAD you can always jump down to the Python scripting layer when you hit limits. Either directly (open View -> Panels -> Python console, then do an action in the UI), or using CadQuery: a OpenSCAD like eDSL for FreeCAD models in Python. For over 150 models I have done this twice.
Note that (semi)automated layout of a sheet for production, there is no good solution in FreeCAD right now. I am quite interested in plugging that hole, but don't have the resources for it at this time...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21184387
Bad day for Adobe. Or a good one? I'm not sure, but definitely an interesting one.
Well, was. They're pushing pretty hard on this evergreen "windows-as-a-service" thing.
Besides i do not see how they could do a "windows-as-a-service" offer without an OS, unless they convince every computer manufacturer to make their PC BIOSes a thin client for Microsoft's servers and you rent computing time/power from their datacenters running Windows (though even then, it'd still be Windows with the same backwards compatibility).
(of course all that sucks for us who want to buy a thing and keep it forever - or at least as "forever" as activation servers will allow you to - but i'm trying to ignore that aspect in this comment here)
No, it just means adobe created a whole new fleet of pirates.
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.
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'.
am I being blithe about this? I don't think I am, but feel free to inform me if I'm missing something.
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.
Everything’s a trade off.
Being able to pay as you go with no long term commitments can be liberating as well.
But companies do not seem to realise this.
> 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.
>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?
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?
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).
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.
Has anything changed since then? It seems Adobe CC was created not long after, so... maybe not a coincidence?
This is the Wikipedia page about the case (to make it easier for others):
What if my browser sent custom headers to Adobe saying that by serving me a webpage Adobe has agreed to sell me, not license, a copy of each new edition of any software they release for $1 in perpetuity and that a breach of contract would result in liquidated damages of $10,000 per undelivered copy.
If I'm bound by Adobe's Terms of Service before I've had a chance to read them by nature of the my browser's request then surely Adobe would be similarly bound to my Terms of Servers(TM) by nature of their response?
If I'm bound by Adobe's Terms of Service before I've had a chance to read them by nature of the my browser's request then surely Adobe would be similarly bound to my Terms of Servers(TM) by nature of their response?
You're not bound until you have had the opportunity to review the TOS. Meaning that merely accessing a page from somewhere else (i.e., a link or url) isn't enough--but once you're on (or revisiting) their website, if you interact with it in any matter beyond visiting the TOS page the TOS would apply even if you chose not to read it.
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/transfer-...
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.
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).
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.
I can tell when you don't have electricity, gasoline, water or food anything is an improvement.
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.
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...
Not the same "overall" quality, to be honest. Burned CDs have much shorter life.
In many jurisdictions, you still have that right. You just have no legal way to exercise that right.
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.
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.
(And Scribus always seemed a steep learning curve too.)
I don't have a need at the moment but good to know there are still some tools that may make sense for more casual users.
You do have to commit to camera brand though.
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.
If you see something you want when you try the beta, please tell me!
I've been getting into photo editing recently, and searched online for a few hours to learn about the differences between the various options. From what i gathered, Luminar (which is a pay once for a lifetime license that you can have installed in up to five machines at a time) is a serious contender to Ps/Lr even at the professional level, let alone at the amateur/occasional user level.
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.
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.
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.
Because the discussion is not whether Affinity apps are good or not, but whether they are good relative to Adobe, anyone that wants to make up their own mind also can download a free trial of CC apps.
Where does it fall short for you? Out of interest.
One other thing that stands alone and is absolutely critical, that would seem to work in Designer but doesn't, is export for embroidery. It is a quirk of my local shop but there is no vector export format from Designer that my shop can use. They end up importing ("digitizing") a jpeg. This causes many more steps in the approval workflow. With Illustrator I just export an eps and they import that and it comes out perfect basically the first time. Obviously Designer can export eps but the software on the other side doesn't like it. (And even though their software can handle native illustrator, import of that doesn't work either. Has to be eps, from Illustrator, not Designer.) I'm 100% sure it's their crap embroidery software (I mean, they are using win95 if that indicates anything), but it is what it is. It's especially odd because embroidery is very low resolution. jpeg should be perfectly fine!! I just get way better final results with the eps flow.
That embroidery issue doesn't come into my evaluation of the goodness or not of Designer as a standalone tool. I just mention it because it does affect me and I think it's an interesting point to bring up. I'm sure many many people are dependent on Illustrator for similar workflow/pipeline issues. It doesn't make the software good or bad, but does create the dependence.
I think the issue people have is they get insulted when you say the software they enjoy to use is not very good. But there are 2 kinds of good. Absolute and relative. Relative to Illustrator, Designer doesn't compare. That is my critique.
There are some things I do like very much about Designer. Personas. Slices. SVG support is much better (keep in mind tho I'm stuck on CS6). These things, however, do not begin to challenge Illustrator.
I understand why Serif would want to stand apart with their own feature set, but now I find myself using 2 tools. Oh how I, and many other non-professional users, would love to replace Illustrator.
Keep in mind, I believe I am in the target demographic for Designer. I am an occasional user, not a daily use professional. The price and pricing model is perfection. The ease of use is perfection. I dare say that the online userbase/forums and free tips and help you can get are much much better. But the lack of features is saddening.
It's interesting because Serif (the company) does not compete with Adobe (the company), even though at a surface level they would appear to. The cost difference between Illustrator and Designer is worlds apart. Maybe this is why they don't work on feature parity. They don't want to be on Adobe's radar.
With Catalina, I'm soon going to have to bail on Illustrator. I'll probably have to invest some time in Inkscape. I could pirate CC or I could use CS6 in Windows VM (again, technically pirating although many would justify it), but I'm not that person.
Since it doesn’t cost anything, it might be worth giving it a test.
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.
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...
I know it's a minor nit and few people will probably care but it's annoying enough for people used to being able to more quickly edit screenshot .PNGs and or .JPGs that I hope Affinity listens eventually. Because of that though I've never gotten used to Affinity Photo where as I'm pretty happy with Affinity Designer
They seem to be focused on Photoshop plugin compatibility over other features at the moment, which is good for some specialized workflows, but I really want better automation in the whole suite.
I'll at least say the lack of automation has finally pushed me to learn more about what I can do with the likes of imagemagick, but the feature-specific use cases like you bring up will be a gap until they fortify those automation features.
They usually do a black friday sale but you can get it here for half price.
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.
https://archive.org/details/mypaint-cdtv
There's also a Sega CD version
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.
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.
As a counterexample to all the GIMP bashing in this thread, I'm using it extensively, don't find its interface crazy and in rare occasions that I use Photoshop or PaintShop Pro I find that my experience in GIMP translates reasonably well.
The point is that a paint application is not something most of us expect to have to spend time learning how to use effectively for the most basic features, because conceptually painting is very simple.
A lot of people expect the simplicity to be the default, and for the complexity to build from that.
A very simple way of making Gimp far more approachable would be to have a "basic" toolbar with a simplified sets of tools and dedicated tools for things like drawing a line, and ask on first startup if you want the basic toolbar or "advanced" toolbars, and tell you how to access additional toolbars.
But there are many other warts as well, such as the Save vs. Export distinction which gives you an error and tells you to use Export if you try to Save with another extension, instead of just bringing up the export options and maybe warning on the first go. 90% of the time when I use Gimp, I have no interest in saving as xcf, and I'd expect that to be the case for a lot of users. Yes, I understand it's worth warning users if they risk losing information, but to then instead telling people effectively "I can see what you're trying to do - it's very obvious, so I'll tell you how to do it instead of doing it" is just annoying.
I never really had an issue on doing anything with GIMP, but in terms of UX i vastly prefer PSP7 which IMO is the last good version of PSP. After many years of using GIMP alone, i reinstalled PSP7 on my PC and i immediately felt much better using it than GIMP (even though GIMP is better on a technical level - faster filters, better alpha support, etc).
I still cannot use Photoshop - or Krita for that matter since they copy Photoshop a lot.
I think one area where GIMP/Inkscape are far better is in the export options. Photoshop & Illustrator barely give you any options for jpeg compression or PNG output. GIMP's JPEG export lets me control color subsampling, optimization, and more. Photoshop just gives me 0% - 100% quality.
It may have been in a different submenu, but the Photoshop JPEG/PNG optimizer was the most powerful/configurable that I've ever seen. Down to letting you configure the palette for PNG.
I looked it up, and it's under "Save for web". It doesn't seem to provide direct chroma subsampling control for JPEG, but the PNG tooling is insane.
Anything comparable on Linux?
I don’t know blender (nor any adobe video editing sw), but as a power user noob in it I expected at least something.
[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’
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?
Broadly, you lose customers. Narrowly, you’re fighting criminal charges for sanctions evasion.
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...
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...
Most of the countries on the list I would consider living in are in the 20-30% range.
Most of the low range countries tend to be poor and underdeveloped, with the odd exceptions of Japan and South Korea with 10%.
Also interesting to see some of the countries with the highest quality of life are generally in the 30% range.
The few countries over 40% (Cuba Belarus China Kuwait Russia) aren't ones I'd personally favor for living.
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.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.
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.
As opposed to music that is part of a subscription where you explicitly knew was being rented.
The way they sell these subscription services doesn't make it at all clear to the users what they are buying.
P.S. plus think about who this model helps the most. It's surely not the artists themselves, especially if the songs I know and love can't be played anymore. What artist would want their work to become inaccessible to those who love it?
The iTunes Music Store where you buy music and pay a one time cost has been around since 2003 and has been completely DRM free since 2009.
That’s like saying people don’t know content isn’t on Netflix forever.
What really offends me when music disappears while I'm paying monthly for the service.
TLDR; the entire subscription model is user hostile in most cases, like this one. And I'll argue it's also rather hostile to the artist here too.
If you don’t like music going away, especially with Apple Music, just buy the music you don’t want to lose and add it to your library. It integrates with the subscription service.
If I rent from the store I know how long I have. If I find something on netflix it could disappear while I'm still trying to get through it. If I save it chances are it won't be there in a few months.
In a far off land of yesteryear, you live happily and healthfully in a small settlement. Despite not being a farmer yourself you own a rooster who wakes you up in time for work every morning.
After years of being awoken by the same rooster, a salesman comes to you telling you of a fancy device which will wake you up at ANY time you wish, not just when the sun rises. You think, this is great! I'll buy one, and wake up later on the weekends (ironically forgetting you still own a rooster...) Of course you knew how to feed the rooster, but this magic device needs power and breaks sometimes... and the only person around to help is, of course, the same salesman. He goes way out his way for you at first, offering free power, and quick repairs. But as time goes on, and as the masses make use of these alarms, he's unable to keep up the same level of service to you. Well that and he's too busy spending all the coin you've given him.
Finally you find yourself with a dead rooster (oops) and a broken alarm clock, with the only repairman out on vacation, while you're missing work in the mornings. Sadly rooster alarm clocks have fallen out of style, and the thought of owning one sounds as crazy then as it does to us now.
First of all, you don't buy an alarm clock, you rent one and pay a monthly subscription. The salesman is all happy to elaborate on the benefits of this arrangement - you won't have to worry about batteries and repairs and such. You're a smart farmer, in your head a CEO of a farming corporation, so you buy the "capex vs opex" argument.
Secondly, the alarm clock doesn't break. You pay the fee, and it works. Except they replace it every two weeks with a slightly different one. Prettier, the salesman says. Over time it loses all the ergonomic handles and knobs, and becomes a flat pane of glass. Better UX, the salesman says. Sometimes weird things happen - you have an impression that it never shows 4:20 PM, or that alarms only fire on even numbered minutes. This may have to do with some contractual kerfuffle between the alarm clock provider and their "partners", because apparently time is intellectual property now.
Then one day you notice that the alarm clock has a camera and a microphone. When cornered, the salesman admits it had one from the very earliest model, and defends themselves by asking how else would they know how to make the product better (and no big deal about the 180 advertising partners; all they care about is making sure your day is even better by getting right products to you). Disgusted, you cut the microphone and tape up the camera (and get accused of stealing revenue from "honest companies").
Then one day your alarm clock bricks itself, because your government said or did something wrong in relation to oil prices and the US government decided your country can go to hell - and since your alarm clock is provided by a US company, it gets stuck forever showing 6:66 AM.
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.
Generally, if the book I'm looking for is sold DRM-free, I'll buy the ebook for convenience. Otherwise, I'll go look for a used paper copy.
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.
EDIT: And to restore from backup you have to know you're missing it. They never gave me any errors or warnings. Just a few things were missing. They're basically gaslighting their users.
More seriously, what prevented an Apple user from uploading it on Torrents? Was it watermarked so Apple would find the culprit?
Steve Jobs argued for DRM free music as a means to interoperability instead of licensing FairPlay way back in 2007 in his “Thoughts on Music” post. He argued that most music was already DRM free and easily copied and only a small percentage of music on most iPods was bought from iTunes.
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).
It's very cheap to run self-hosted these days even on your own HW. 1GB/20GB VMs cost $1-$2 per month.
Really, this should be an age of self-hosted if the cost was ever a limit.
But it's possible to run all kinds of other stuff, if you know how. All kinds of scratch your itch apps, monitoring, backup, small web apps, file sharing, audio server, seedbox, databases, etc. Stuff you'd not find a service for, because it violates copyright when it's not done for personal use, etc.
It's especially useful if there are multiple people in the household.
Most of what you list are or can be one-time costs. And most of it can be automated in a run-a-script, check for errors and forget about it in 1 minute, or deal with some failure in 15minutes.
The main benefit of running your own is that there are almost no ongoing costs. Lot's of the SaaS prices are really overblown, so running your own is appealing there.
And people spend time and stress on dealing with SaaS issues too from time to time, so it's not like you just pay and use without any additional costs.
It just needs a serious consideration.
Also running your own can be fun/fulfilling in its own way, because you now have more control and you're allowed more creativity. For some people that may ba a benefit too.
You can can indeed improve privacy, but it normally means giving up speed (like Tor).
Additionally, there are other issues of p2p as a main solution. For example, phone battery or often being blocked in routers of public spaces etc.
I think that a mix between Fediverse and P2P would be nice.
A power user can choose to be a node, knowing the price. But the common user would use some server/service to access it. But those must be planned such that switching is easy.
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.
The most basic proof of ownership is the fact of having that something, and there being no party claiming that you took it from them. Copying bits is so cheap everyone can get a copy from someone else who volunteered their copy and there's no point in even metering that. There's arguably little sense to have a market for digital data, yet we persist at trying. What you're seeking with blockchain is proof of compliance with a complex and somewhat arbitrary set of regulations.
I agree that intellectual property rights might reduce overall efficiency due to the artificial complexity and friction it adds.
Very true. I often gloss over that harsh aspect of reality.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...
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" ?
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..
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.
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.
Sure it’s in the name of Executive order but still leaves a bad taste. It says you can’t trust Adobe.
Under the plain text of the order, that's true only for a very expansive definition of “associates”, since it includes anyone who has (past tense, without limitation as to time window) acted, even indirectly, on behalf of the government or any of the identified individuals and entities, or on behalf of any entity that is, even indirectly, owned or controlled by the government or any of the named entities or individuals.
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
Edit: deleted "Can't apologise after you drop a sales nuke" in favour of a more measured comment.
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...
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.
Pirating looks like the only option, if that is even still possible with all of the features now tied to the cloud.
Piracy? Surely this doesn't count as a "solution". Just because you can evade a ban doesn't mean that they "still have access" - I mean they do but it's not legal.
I am just curious, what would be the right way for companies to tackle this, how would they know who is the family of a regime official for example? Most people's comments seem to be aimed at Adobe instead of the complexity that is dealing with this executive order.
Not in the U.S., no, but is it illegal in Venezuela? They are under no obligation to recognize U.S. copyright claims. Or any copyright claims, for that matter. And why would they, given that the U.S. is enforcing sanctions against them?
My gut reaction is that if Venezuela is apart of any of the international trade laws then it'd still be illegal but there's essentially no way in practice you'd get in trouble for it (Assuming you're a Venezuelan citizen and you aren't like blatantly selling it in the street or something).
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.
If I were venezuelan I'd just pirate the software and avoid this nonsense.
> 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.
(I can believe they could have wanted it, but it would take time, and I suppose getting compliant with an executive order of the President is something you want to do as fast as possible.)
Page 1 of https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
Kinda seems like there's no excuse for going about it this way.
And… which other government has never made a surprising decision?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
PDF: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
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.e. Do the same thing they are doing now, just be more open and honest about their reasons.
They officially apply to anyone who has ever, directly or indirectly, done anything on behalf of the government, or of those identified individuals and entities. So, if they made your presentation, it would be an inaccurate minimization of the plain language of the executive order.
Seems like not much of a stretch to consider all citizens controlled by the Gov.
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)
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.
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.
This is how Steam works for example.
Think Steam.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comments/den9r5/adobe_cierra_o...
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.
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.
Host it yourself or with a local service provider in your own country.
That's all you get after paying hundreds, or thousands, for a 'cloud' service that used to be standalone software.
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).
Can anyone with more experience translate the order?
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?
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.
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.
Of course this method won't work if you can't access it in the first place....
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.)
How does this affect Magento for example?
Seems pretty immoral if you ask me
Heavens to Murgatroyd.
See: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/painter-create-with-co...
Safe prediction is that in the future no software or technology purchased will have its origin in the US.
"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"
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.
I could see a given country limiting some specific things but something so broad, I don't know what value that is.
Harsh.
Nice move, United States.
never saw a single ad from them before there
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?
Imagine my surprise here seeing so many people supporting Adobe.
Nor does everyone here feel the need to take strong political stands on a hacker forum. So it’s a tough thing to gauge.
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.
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?
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 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.
Even if they didn't want to do that, they could do the Jetbrains perpetual fall-back license model where if you hold a license for version x for a year, you get to keep version x. You still get version y when it comes out, but if you cancel before a certain time, it will fall back to your license for x forever, until you pay your subscription again.
"Failure" in this case is legal, not technical (distinction without a difference to users).
I'm not remotely saying I agree with it, but its been transparent enough that their user base hasn't revolted and found something better, so this will be more and more common with software.
I'm not sure about the rest of CC, but adobe has a near-monopoly with photoshop. I personally use Pixelmator for all my image editing needs, but I am not an image-editing pro... if I was Pixelmator would NOT cut it... my only real choice would be photoshop.
> their user base hasn't revolted and found something better,
If no viable alternatives exist, the choice is not do it or pay whatever they ask. Which is why many cc users feel like hostages.
On a personal note, I really wish they would have done a Linux release.
Oh, how so? You think that it pays for them to fight and defy a government order?
Designing a fail-safe system involves acknowledging that you may not know why the system may fail, just that something must be done to mitigate the problem if it does. International sanctions proved to be such an unexpected point of failure.
For quite a few things, Adobe products are just irreplaceable.
Until people learn to face some inconvenience and limitations they'll just keep being abused by these companies. Changing the world requires some personal pain.
You might be proposing a bigger rebellion against capitalism than just illegally selling to Venezuela :)
As an Aussie, I look at these international companies as that: international. Should I now start considering all forms of non Aussie software /tech a matter of potential infiltration?
I hope Adobe understand they are now complicit in an international fracas, where there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.
They will blame Adobe for this, and not some executive order.
What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.
Considering the converse is already true, why not?
What do you mean by "the converse"?
Yes! And if they were truly internatonal as you thought they were, it would be even worse, because they would be immune from any legal action. Corporations acting as if they were sovereign powers would be even worse than they are today.
> there's a lot of innocent people in Venezuela likely feeling an immediate financial crush, simply because the software they were using stopped. They can't work now. No money means they can't feed their kids.
That's, unfortunately, the whole point of sanctions. They work by inflicting enough civilian damage to get people to bully their own government into submitting to the will of party issuing the sanction.
> What about the day when some US order outlaws my country? This is a very sad day for international tech.
Most of your SaaSes you depend on will stop working. This is a reminder why SaaS as practiced today is a bad idea.
List of the countries under consequential US sanctions attention and their systems of government:
Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions
I too hope Australia is never like those countries. The countries that the US targets sanctions on, no coincidence, are always near the bottom of the Democracy Index (and typically very high on corruption rankings).
Short list of liberal democracies that have zero fear of falling under comparable US sanctions today:
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and so on.
The reason why so many powerful, influential, affluent, liberal nations cooperate with the US so frequently on sanctions - and have for much of the post WW2 era - is because they know they are under zero threat from the US sanctioning them and they also know the US has exclusively targeted sanctions at non-democratic, extremely high-corruption nations.
It's really simple in fact, here's the Democracy Index. On average the higher countries rank, the less they ever need to be concerned about US sanctions being directed at them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Some of the countries near the bottom of that democracy list: Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela.
> Russia: dictatorship. Cuba: dictatorship. Iran: theocratic dictatorship. Venezuela: dictatorship. North Korea: dictatorship. Syria: dictatorship. Sudan: recently a military junta.
I read it as: Russia: enemy ex-superpower, second biggest net oil exporter. Cuba: stole our oil refineries half a century ago, we're still mad about it. Iran: in top 10 of net oil exporters (also, tried to take them over and fucked up). Venezuela: top ten of net oil exporters. North Korea: old enemy, though also universally considered evil. Syria: US wants to force a government change and supports the rebels; there could be an indirect oil-related angle in here.
It may be that I've just been reading too much about energy economics recently and am getting all consipracy-theorist. Even if so, I absolutely don't buy that there's any higher good for any of those sanctions.
Russia is technically a democracy, but given that Putin controls the press directly, murders opposition members, and thwarts opponents from running in elections, it's a de-facto dictatorship.
Those are all terrible, terrible places frankly we shouldn't trade with them purely on a moral basis - but we would tolerate them if they played nice.
FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false. And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power, they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA. And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory. The US would love to rid itself of any entanglement in Syria, and frankly Iran if it could.
The Saudis are the same and they also didn't play nice.
> FYI: Cuba did not 'steal oil' this is false.
I wrote "oil refineries", and I must be misunderstanding Wikipedia then, when it says:
"on October 19, 1960 (almost two years after the Cuban Revolution had led to the deposition of the Batista regime) the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation and as a response to Cuba's role in the Cuban missile crisis. On February 7, 1962 the embargo was extended to include almost all exports.[1]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...
> And nobody cares about Iran's Oil power,
Doubtful, given the amount of oil they have and export.
> they care that Iran has a publicly stated objective literally of overthrowing the USA.
Which is entirely because of the "tried to take them over and fucked up" thing I mentioned.
> And Syria has no oil, your points verge on conspiracy theory.
Of course it has oil, it's even an exporter. But here I thought about the longer-term US involvement over the last decades. They didn't start messing with countries in the region because of terrorists or WMDs.
(I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitics, I'm just saying how the "look at these sanctions, they're all against dictatorships!" claim upthread reads to me, with my mind currently primed on worldwide energy economy.)
Now - Saudi Arabia is not keen on human rights in general, and does not play very nice with their weapons, but the clear reality is that they would be happy to stay put at home.
The Saudi Government is not actively trying to destabilise the region or the world, they play nice with the West, and work closely with the US etc. to hunt down terrorists, and of course they have Oil which they sell freely on world markets, with no strategic dealings with others (i.e. China, Russia) - that's why they are an ally. So yes, democracy is obviously not the entire motivation for US sanctions, but it's part of the equation.
>Saudi Arabia was reported to be deliberately targeting means of food production and distribution in Yemen[47] by bombing farms,[48][49] fishing boats,[50] ports,[51] food storages, food factories,[52][53] and other businesses[54] in order to exacerbate famine. These actions led to the UN accusing the Saudi-led coalition of committing war crimes and having a "complete disregard for human life"
>On August 3, 2019, a United Nations report said the US, UK and France may be complicit in committing war crimes in Yemen by selling weapons and providing support to the Saudi-led coalition which is using the starvation of civilians as a tactic of warfare
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_takeover_in_Yemen
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/27/serious-ques...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Yemen_(2016%E2%80%93...
'US company' is to the rest of the world becoming a liability in many ways fast.
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.
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.