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US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel | The Justice Department alleges that Adobe hid early cancellation fees and trapped consumers in pricey subscriptions (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Somewhere on my PC I have a several page long rant about how many government websites in Canada require you to pay for an Adobe subscription in order to sign an "official" PDF.

Why the hell isn't there a better option for filling out legally required, government mandated forms than giving a private corporation money? This bothers me so fucking much.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Feeling daring? If you have to buy the software anyway, invoice the government department the price of the software.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

My mom worked in accounting for the local government. You'd be surprised how many invoices are getting paid without double checking

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can't fill it out with Firefox? I think pdf.js (which Firefox uses) supports PDF forms.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nope, I've tried every other option I could think of. All the browsers, a few websites, ms office products, non ms office products, some graphic design tools.. to Adobe's credit they did a great job making sure people had to pay

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Ahh, it's probably using some proprietary features that only exist in Adobe products.

I'm not sure if they still sell it, but Adobe used to have a suite of form tools where the person filling out the form had to use Adobe Acrobat (it used some non-standard PDF form features), and the company collecting the form responses had to use software built on top of Adobe ColdFusion (which costs thousands of dollars per server). They really tried to lock people in to their form ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

What's even more crazy, is Adobe has a system called something like "docusign", where you can just fill the document in in-browser.

I'm fortunate that I haven't yet hit a form I couldn't just edit in GIMP!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I’m curious about this. If demonstrable, it seems many Canadians could sue.

What is the typical user workflow? For example:

An embedded Adobe applet (e.g. fill, sign, and submit on the government website)
Token-based API (e.g. redirect or spawn child window/tab, user fills and signs on adobe site, user returned to government site)
Something else (e.g. upload button with server-side validation for digital signing)

Edit: looked into this a bit. Did you receive an error message like the following?

This document does not allow you to save any changes you have made to it unless you are using Adobe Acrobat Standard DC or Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

(Regardless it’s totally shitty that government websites recommend a specific company’s software, especially Adobe. I’m just trying to figure out if they actually force citizens to pay a private company.)