FFS
This shit is getting old. Time to sue. Or prosecute.
How about this for bizarre bug of the week: the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud deletes the first hidden directory in root directories on Macs. That's bad news for users of BackBlaze: the backup software stores a .bzvol folder in the top level of every drive it backs up, and uses these folders to store information about …
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>Has anyone ever seen any evidence of a QA dept. at Adobe?
'Twas done on a clean install of the OS, with only adobe installed. Realistically, it would be a pretty hard bug to find by symptom outside beta test/general release.
That doesn't excuse the coding flaw and (lack of) audit.
The time to stop putting such faith in QA ihas long passed to prevent this sort of problem.
The fact is that all unix based operating systems and whatever mish mash of stuff that currently constitutes Windows allows all the to happen has cost however many billions of hours and pounds in time spent resolving issues because users and applications can easily go in and dellete folders and files.
All decent unix sysadmins know that you don't login or run as root unless you are doing specific admin work on the file system, and you are VERY careful when doing so : even if tthe change seems trivilal, you conciously take extra care. Everything ellse you do under a user account with appropriate privileges specifically to prevent these sort of "accidents".
Time for Apple / MS / Linux distros that asprire to general desktop use by non IT people to enforce this model as the default configuration when installed. And installed application packages then get explicitly sandboxed so they can't touch anything else apartr from their own files in non-root user mode. And yes, it will be patronising, but when that OS boots up the first few times, the user has to sit and read a warning that root /administrator logins should only ever be done by experienced people to do specific cleanup and modifications, etc, but if you ignore this and run at this level of privilege out of laziness anything you screw up, you fix..
It is partly to do with subscription licencing... It doesn't matter whatever is shat out of Adobe's main branch onto people's computers at the end of the month, if there's a problem the fix is for the customer to stay subscribed for a month or two more until it magically fixes itself.
If it were a software package they would have an alpha/beta test to detect it and they'd have to hold the release until it's fixed because it'd be a show stopper.
@KeithR
"It's PRECISELY FUCK ALL to do with subscription licencing . . ."
Yes, the BUG itself has nothing to do with subscription licensing but its impact absolutely does because one of the the things with subscription-licensed, cloud-activated software is the automatic updating.
It's the difference between the user controlling the software on their machine and the vendor controlling it. The users are at their mercy.
I canceled my Adobe "agreement" two months ago, feeling really good about it!
Funny thing, their call centre tried to claim that because I had allowed two automatic payments to occur (beyond the one-year contract), I had therefore also automatically re-upped for a second year's contract. Meaning, I was now auto-obligated to rent their stuff for another full year.
I made loud noises like "theft" and "actionable." They quickly changed their tune and made a "special exception" just for me. Weasels.
What I find funniest about this, is how badly the coders must cock up for this to happen.
You don't 'accidentally' delete the *contents* of the first hidden folder *in alphabetical order*.
How do they even find the folder they want to delete? Do they just go into the file system and take the list of folders contained in / and then iterate through them to find the first hidden folder? Who codes like that? I mean "first hidden folder" is really specific. Even if they did want to delete a folder in /tmp/adobe_installer/ or something, just using the first random thing that pops up and then deleting that? I mean I'm a shit programmer but even I don't do that...
I'm assuming that they must create a hidden folder as part of the installation process and in the cleanup process they grab the directory listing, filter it for the relevant temp folder and then pass it as a list through to a generic cleanup routine that thankfully is just popping off the first folder in the list.
My assumption is that the filter routine is broken so we should be thankful that the CC installer doesn't delete the entire hard drive. Perhaps Adobe's QA team might have spotted that one.
You're so 20th century!!!
This is DevOps! The goal is continuous delivery, the metric is MTTR[1] (Mean Time to Remediate) and the strategy is BTIP[2] (Beta Test in Production).
Shipping junk doesn't matter. What counts is you pass the unit tests, ship to schedule, and then clean up the mess in the next iteration (of junk).
[1] No, I'm not making that up:
http://m.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/devops_bs_detector/
[2] That one I made up.
That a cloud-based piece of software is responsible for destroying local data... If the "Cloud" (sic) is such a good idea, why is there any need for using a local drive at all?
In fact, I think it should be required that there should be no drive installed for cloud-based software to work - let's see how well it works then. :)
WTF adobe..
I stopped upgrading Adobe CC after (11,12?) - whatever the last version was that I could still purchase.
FU adobe ( I haven't said that in a while and they need to hear it). They haven't produced a product that I use in many years now.
(I've been getting downvoted a lot lately, my guess is that this post will continue that trend.. Now, get off my lawn).
... of lazy developer and flawed OS design.
The lack of attributes on files and proper permissions by *nix systems in 2016 is truly incredible. And of course lazy developers will write stupid software that will create havoc on designs forty years too old.
Proper permissions on properly hidden folders would have forbidden bad developers to delete what they should have not.
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Hmm, after this I am proud to say my Mac is an adobe free zone.
No flash
No acrobat
No photoshop
Or anything else made by that company
Might be due to an argument with cancelling a CC subscription though....
Also get regularly spammed on the email address that was only ever used for creative cloud login....