Because a few days ago, I got a call from a crazy person telling me I was being ‘investigated’ for Fraud for having obtained a payday loan using a Wells Fargo account. When I pointed out that I neither have a paycheck nor an account at Wells Fargo, this person went into a litany of ‘you’re a liar,’ and lines like ‘I bet your mother is proud.’ (To wit, my return was ‘and yours must have cracked a bottle of champagne when you joined a team of maggots who feast on the flesh of others.’) The same day, I found out that Harper Lee, one of the greatest success stories of literature had a lawyer who, after she had a stroke, got her to sign away all her rights to her own works (To Kill a Mockingbird still makes $1.5M a year). What does all this have to do with Adobe? Well, after the phishing call the other day I initially blamed myself for picking up a call that was blocked, but then I remembered, Adobe let all my information be poached and it was ultimately published on the internet. Ironically a few months after the nightmare of being one of the people whose data was stolen at CountryWide had finally subsided. Of course, I did a search and found a thread immediately about how these idiots, claiming to be from ‘United’ and talking about payday loans, have been a scourge for years, oh, and even if you caught one with dialer in hands, in this great land of ours, born of revolution, they have done nothing wrong so your recourse is, yes, bubkiss.
Let’s start with the guy who was working for Harper Lee. Apparently they threatened him and he signed the rights back. If that’s the end of that case, I am going to march over to Change.org and start a petition to run that disease ridden barn weasel from the marketplace. Frankly, the only thing in that case that would feel like justice would be to have a frigate drop him on an Aleutian Island to scrounge for rat meat for a couple years (with a copy of TKaM in hand of course). We all know that won’t happen. Wall Street didn’t have to show us this, but to quote another great American of letters who likewise was deemed of so little value that he spent 2 decades making wine commercials:
Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.
From the great Mr. Arkadin by Orson Welles. Actually, the Lee Case shows you that even if you have means, you will be preyed upon, so unless there are consequences for vermin to fear, like living in a jail cell for a couple years, we are going to see more of this, not less.
The part about the Adobe case that really chaps my hide is that there is nary a company on earth that is more paranoid about having you steal from them. If you own their products and you install a new version of your operating system (for instance because something awful has happened), Adobe will not let you transfer your install of their software. It will start up and demand a reinstall, of the whole suite, before it will so much as let you save a single edit to one file. This happened to me in the midst of preparing some stuff I really needed so I stopped what I was doing and went ahead and fell into a vortex of stupidity where verifying my prior licenses led me through an online chat, then their online list of prior license numbers, to finally being able to resintall everything (and at the time I had just ordered a Mac Pro so I was thinking ‘oh cheer, I can do this all again a month or two from now’).
While these truly are crimes in my version of the world, there still is no greater crime than Flash. Ars estimated that it eats one third of every battery charge, and yet this hideous pestilence is still out there wasting energy and making people think their machines are slow. I have had conversations with people many times in the last few years who tell me ‘my machine is slow, I need to get one with 16 GBs of RAM,’ and my responses are: 1. you don’t need 16 GBs of RAM, and 2. run your machine with Flash turned off for a week. Mavericks has app nap and some other tricks that do make a huge difference, but for sure there has never been a greater flesh eating pestilence in the history of computing.
Now for the final question here: why can a company that has show such flagrant disregard for their customers, and committed such atrocities against, yay, the bloody ecosystem, be immune to the degree of silly carping that nags apple on a daily basis? I am truly puzzled. In the midst of this latest nightmare of having my cell carpet bombed, someone I know sent me an article about Apple removing a Bitcoin app from the store, howling about how it shows they can’t compete and the company is turning to the dark side. Apple ranked #1 in a study I saw a week or so ago in the job they have done to protect their customers data. Most of these same people are still seething over the Snowden Affair. When I pointed this out, and brought up the fact that countless other companies failed to protect my information, the response was ‘Apple’s not invincible, someone will hack them.’ Try and ponder for a moment what a ludicrous answer that is: ‘I can draw on Apple’s account of good will for crimes as silly as removing an app from the store (which we still do not have a reason for), but if you tell me of any positive behavior, I’ll write it off as they are no better, their card has just not come up yet.’ Ah, Reason…
This is not just a case of cognitive dissonance. I think what happens is people have to demonize parties of a certain stature for it to feel satisfying, and Adobe still doesn’t appear to most people as the mindless, net-based trawler of all life that they are. Bully for them. In the meantime, I am DYING to see some competition finally drive a stake between their ribs. So if you are a registered CS user and you have an issue with Apple’s growing inability to embrace your perception of open marketplace ethics, please don’t complain to me.
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