Zhanga: January 23, 2008
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« Jan 15, 2008 | All January 2008 posts | Jan 25, 2008 »Wednesday, January 23, 2008 (2 comments)
Let me tell you why I hate DRM.
Vault has a bunch of pretty informative industry and employer guides. The problem is that they distribute them as encrypted PDFs.
In Linux, I usually use kpdf, which I like a lot. So I tried to open the file, but it asked me for a password. I tried a bunch of strings for the password, but none of them worked. Then I tried the other 2 PDF readers that I have installed, and of course they didn't work either. (There is no "password.")
So I booted up my Windows XP virtual machine, and installed the official Adobe Reader from adobe.com. I opened the file again, and Adobe told me that it didn't have some security plugin required to read this file. Vault.com actually has an entire section of their site dedicated to problems with their stupid DRM. Isn't that a wake-up call that the DRM sucks?
I read that section but couldn't find anything about any plugin. It did say that Adobe Reader 8 has problems reading these encrypted files. So I installed Adobe Reader 7, which runs on Linux, so I didn't have to fiddle with the virtual machine and its slowness. I got a similarly worthless and vague error about some plugin.
So then I finally gave up. I rebooted into a real Windows installation and found a copy of Adobe Reader 7. I installed it, and opened Internet Explorer to go to vault.com. Turns out that I couldn't login using IE7, but there was no mention of this on the site. I would push login and would just get redirected to the home page without an error. So then I had to install Firefox (I know, I know, what am I doing without Firefox to begin with) just to login.
After downloading the file, it finally opened (after trying 6 PDF readers). But do I really want to boot into Windows just to read a PDF? I can't use email, IM, or really anything but games in Windows. So I tried to print the encrypted PDF to a PDF printer (standard way to create PDFs), but that just kept giving me errors, which I guess is by design so you can't get rid of the DRM.
Without further detailing my frustration, the solution was to print about 200 dead-tree pages. I'm pretty sure that's more pages than I've printed in the previous two and a half years at Duke. DRM kills babies.
11:57AM
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Comments
without drm the economy would collapse
pat on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 11:12 PM
DRM or KellyB kills more babies?
rj on Thursday, January 24, 2008 at 6:20 AM
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