do these "off the back of the truck" dealers sell my contact info to porn-spammers, the way Adobe did? It'd be worth dealing with them at full price if not.

(How do I know? single-use email address on registration form got porn-spam less than an hour after I "submitted" to Adobe. There is, BTW, no abuse@adobe.com, or wasn't at the time. Brings a whole new meaning to "customer service" :-)

Shouldn't the "Software & Information Industry Association" be "Software & Information Industry Ass."?

Of course my feelings about the scumbags selling pirated software are another thing, but I digress.

The Internet for all its blessings has been a curse. The worlds most scumbag lecherous and thieving rats all use it...those who generated the system pretend they cannot stop abuse (yawnnnn!)..yet America's spy programme "Echelon" stores every electronic message with a key word or phrase in it. The technology isn't all that hard.

Ebay and PayPal are a couple of shonkers themselves...my experience is that the crooks get good treatment and the innocent get the raw deal.My ebay looses to crooks add to about $9000 US...and eBay and PayPal have a stack of compute generated names which reply with stupid letters, no continuity, to make sure your complaint goes no where if that's what they want.

So..adobe...selling to porn brokers..no doubt I suppose...its amazing how much scum stuff I received immediately after complaining to gmail and qmail about fraudsters....Unfortunately computers and the Internet are the alter egos of millions of fraudulent people who might have been better suffocated at birth.

I agree with the suits...and I aslo agree that if adobe is selling off information, it also should be sued, by class action, at no costs to those taking the action if the case passes a discretionary testing by the Department of Justice.

I can't say computers are not a huge asset but it they died away tomoorow I reckon I'd take about 3 months to get over it...the world might regain some sanity....there was not a lot wrong in the 1960's..oh sorry, Bush was alive then wasn't he?...go back a bit...

Cheers.

Don't support the pirates by buying stuff off of them! You support terrorism, gangs, smugglers, armed robbery, druggery, buggery, thuggery and all sorts of anti-social shite like that.

why not just get utorrent or azeureas (sp?) or anything, and have it before the auction closes....or spend the extra 10 or 15 quid and get a fscking legal copy with free updates for a year and what not - and no viruses, for gods sake its not a bloody fortune is it?!

Retarded unknowing consumers!

I am after some software (not Adobe but they are on the same lines), Got an email shot to say it was on offer and included a free app worth £50.

Hit the site and got as far as the checkout with the total at $50.

I hit the button to convert to GPB and got rerouted to the UK part of the site.

Now the total has hit £70 and there is no free application.

Funnily enough there was also no sale!

one suspects, the suspects did not expect to be suspected. Any news on the fekers who charge £50 for P&P?

If you would ONLY run Free Open Source Software on your Windows machine, there is the TTCS OSSWIN Free CD of 100 mature apps, you will have secure, safe, FREE software without any 'registration' problems, full and free support forums and usergroups, and the capability to actually contact the real authors if you ever encounter a glitch.

Whenever you try to contact proprietary software companies, since they are in it for the money, there is the strong possibility that they will mis-identify you as a thief, ala Microsoft's broken "Genuine Advantage" problem child ( 7day server outages, during Labor Day break!).

A major issue is that proprietary software is not well supported, most customers are used as 'beta' testers, and after the sale, there is little incentive for the company to support the product!

Then, too, the license disclaimer for proprietary software that you signed permits all of those folks to sell your Identity to the thieves in Russia or some former satellite nation of the USSR! Major credit data on millions of folks was sold to an identity theft ring in 2006!

Open Source software grows exponentially because it is user supported, and authors can even perish, and there are no restrictions about some other person contributing updates, and continuing the good work!

OSS? Suuuure. Some of us here in the real world have real work to do, and need to use real applications which have real support available, not some half-assed assemblage of poorly conceived code slapped together by autistic basement dwellers who laugh up their voluminous sleeves and cry "RTFM" when some poor n00b dares ask a question about their horrible crapware.