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As AI development rapidly expands, people are replicating paid-for desktop and mobile apps with free apps, potentially changing the future of legacy software. Last week, a Reddit user named Brandon Thomas shared a project called “ArtCraft” – essentially a free rebuild of the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes programmes such as Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated services have been named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft. This software package usually costs individuals $779.99 per year if paid upfront or $69.99 per month on an annual contract. Earlier this week, ArtCraft also released copies of the Microsoft Office suite. As with the Adobe...

A small team of 2-4 "Vibecoders" from a company called Aircraft, using Anthropics Claude AI Opus 5.5 model, fed the binary machine code for Adobe's Creative Suite of software products into Opus 5.5 and have produced a workable source code and the entire suite of products which they have released as open source. Acknowledging that plenty of bugs exist in the initial release, the company is saying within a month they should have all the bugs resolved. The implications of this are HUGE, if 2-4 people using AI can feed the binary machine code of any proprietary into a current...

If you're looking to raise one of the most powerful business leaders in the world, you might want to send your kid to Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, in India. In an interview with Stephen Dubner on an episode of the "Freakonomics" podcast, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that not only did he attend the high school, but so did Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe, and Ajay Banga, the CEO of Mastercard. Hyderabad Public School is what Americans would consider a private school — though in India, like England, such schools are called public schools. According to Hyderabad Public School's...

The U.S. Labor Department announced it would suspend Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL were also suspended from the program. ... Vice President JD Vance criticized Microsoft specifically, pointing to the firm’s 6,000 layoffs in 2025. Vance claimed that the company “replaced” those workers with people on H-1B visas. “So we’re going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, but we’re also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going...

An open-source developer has posted Wine patches that remove one of the last blockers for Adobe Creative Cloud installers on Linux. With the patched Wine build, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Adobe Photoshop 2025 are reported to install under Linux.

T-Mobile, the US telecom giant, announced on Monday that it has appointed its current Chief Operating Officer, India-born Srini Gopalan, as the company’s next Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective November 1, 2025. With this elevation, Gopalan joins the distinguished club of India-born CEOs heading some of the world’s most influential companies in the US, a group that includes Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Google, Vimal Kapur of Honeywell, Raj Subramaniam of FedEx, Arvind Krishna of IBM, and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe.

Adobe’s recent changes to its terms of service have indeed sparked concern among creators. When users opened Photoshop, they were greeted with a pop-up informing them of these adjustments. While it’s common for companies to update their terms of service, Adobe’s changes go beyond the usual permissions. Specifically, section 2.2 of the terms now grants Adobe the right to access content generated from its programs for various purposes, including training artificial intelligence (AI). Here’s a summary of the key points: Access to Your Content: Adobe’s updated terms of service allow them to access and view your content for various purposes,...

In an unusually public conflagration between an artist’s estate and a tech giant, the Ansel Adams Trust hit back at Adobe for selling AI-generated images using the famed photographer’s name. Adams, a member of the famed Group f/64, is best known for his images of the American West, whose vast forests and mountains he photographed in sleek black and white. On its stock photography website Adobe Stock, the company was selling pictures produced using generative AI that recalled Adams’s work, albeit with noticeable differences. In one picture that has since been deleted from Adobe Stock, a cloud rolls into...

Adobe’s Firefly seems to be following in the woke footsteps of Google’s failed Gemini AI image producer — generating photos of black Nazis and black and female founding fathers. In a test of the product conducted by The Post on Thursday, Firefly produced an image of two smiling black men standing in front of an American flag when prompted to create a photo of the “founding fathers of the USA.” Searches for the 1787 Constitutional Convention also produced images of both black men and white women standing in front of the historic State House in Philadelphia, Penn., and a search...

Adobe’s AI image creation tool, Firefly, has stumbled into the same pitfalls as Google’s Gemini AI by creating woke revisions of history, raising concerns about the limitations and biases inherent in generative AI systems. Semafor reports that as tech giants race to develop cutting-edge generative AI tools, the potential for these systems to perpetuate harmful biases and spread misinformation has become a growing concern. Adobe’s recently launched Firefly, an AI image creation tool, has found itself embroiled in a controversy reminiscent of Google’s Gemini AI, highlighting the challenges companies face in controlling these powerful yet imperfect technologies. Like Gemini before...

Citing what they describe as a “hostile” political climate, hundreds of Adobe workers are protesting the company’s decision to hold its flagship MAX conference in Miami Beach in October, according to a Wednesday report from Business Insider. The outlet secured a 10-page petition sent to company leadership, signed by more than 500 employees of the San Jose tech giant. The petition said workers were “shocked and dismayed” by MAX’s move to Florida, and called out the state’s history of “egregious policies,” BI reported. “We sincerely hope that the overwhelming evidence that Florida is a hostile environment for Adobe’s employees, partners,...

"The Middle East looks set for a path of escalation on multiple fronts as Israeli forces close in on what is left of southern Gaza, and as Yemen’s Houthi rebels launch their most damaging strike yet on a ship in the Red Sea.The crew of the British-owned, Belize-flagged bulk carrier MV Rubymar were forced to abandon ship in the Gulf of Aden on Monday, receiving help from a nearby merchant vessel and coalition warship to reach a nearby port after “two anti-ship ballistic missiles were launched from Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen,” according to U.S. Central Command." (snip) Twenty-six...

The generative AI will change the way economy functions and businesses are run; it will be a game changer for in many verticals In a world driven by unprecedented technological advancements, there emerges a groundbreaking force that promises to reshape the very fabric of innovation: generative artificial intelligence. With its awe-inspiring ability to create, compose, and imagine, generative AI has surged to the forefront of scientific exploration, capturing the imaginations of researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists alike. From generating realistic images and synthesising music to aiding in drug discovery and revolutionising customer experiences, this cutting-edge technology possesses the potential to revolutionise...

John Warnock, who invented the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died. He was 82. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by family, Adobe said in a statement. The company didn't give a cause of death or say where Warnock died.“John’s brilliance and innovations left an indelible mark on Adobe, the technology industry and the world,” Adobe said. Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way...

Programmers can never leave well enough alone. (Think of all the once-great applications programs that had great features that were deprecated.) I don't think it was greed that caused this deprecation of a very usable feature. (When on Bookmark panel, you used to be able to Ctrl-Shift-Tab to go to Page Thumbnails, panel, an essential keyboard shortcut when processing a large volume of pages.) I think it is simply programmers who know nothing about users, who are marketing morons, who have too much time on their hands, on an application that was perfected 20 years ago, so they have to...

Okta, the $25 billion market cap company that handles logins for more than 100 million users, today confirmed it suffered a breach in January via a third party customer support provider. But for some customers who spoke to Forbes, the disclosure was too late and too scant with information. Okta’s admittance came after a hacking crew called LAPSUS$, which extorts its targets after stealing their data and often leaks victims’ information in public forums, claimed it had breached the company. LAPSUS$ had previously claimed to have stolen data from major security companies including NVIDIA and Microsoft, leading both to investigate...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

The railroad system in Dalian, northern China, collapsed citywide on Tuesday for up to 20 hours after the Adobe Flash programing software stopped running. Adobe had announced as early as 2017 that it would cease support for the multimedia software on Dec. 30 last year. The American software company eventually ended the operation of all Flash content on Tuesday. Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting...

I have been getting on-screen reminders lately that Flash Player support will end on December 31st 2020. Without getting too technical, can some kind FReepers tell me what, if anything, I need to install in order to do what Flash Player once did?