Quote:
Originally Posted by BrentEubanks
Do you know how to find out from Adobe how many activations you have left on a particular account?
|
No, I don't think they make that information public. According to some standards document I found online a while ago, every AdobeID starts with 6+6 possible activations (6 for computers and 6 for eReaders), and gains 1+1 additional activation every year. If you need more than that, you can contact Adobe and they'll usually reset the limit for you. (Of course don't mention this plugin, just say something like "I had to reinstall my computer a couple times and now it says I ran out of activations".)
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
Thanks for this plugin. I was able to use it to download a PDF that was too large for my installed ADE version 2.0.1 to handle. (It would crash when receiving a 1.5GB file, probably because it is only a 32-bit program.)
|
Yeah, some other people have told me that as well - my plugin being able to download a bunch of PDF files that even ADE can't handle. It seems to be related to file size somewhat, but not just file size as some large files did work in ADE for them. Maybe it's just general complexity and running out of RAM while parsing the internal structure, so a large simple PDF might work but a large complex one fails.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
Have you considered adding the ability to import an activation from an already installed and activated ADE? That would be useful in avoiding using up an activation on the plugin.
|
I have thought about that, but A) that's pretty complicated and B) it probably drastically increases the chances of Adobe detecting what you're doing. It would require you to already be using one particular old-ish version of ADE (the one the plugin emulates) so Adobe doesn't notice that you "downgraded" an activation which is normally not possible. Also, in the data sent to Adobe there's tons of device IDs/machine IDs sent to Adobe in hashed form. These are just stored in the plugin settings as they are dumped / generated the first time, so moving one activation with this plugin around to multiple machines is fine (that's why it always says "Authorized on device X" even when you copy the activation over to other computers).
This means, that if there's errors in my plugin on how these IDs are generated (which there probably are), then Adobe is not going to know that and it doesn't matter - because all they see is the constant hash. However, if I import an activation from ADE (which does NOT store this hash and instead re-generates it from machine data every time it's needed), I would need to generate that data myself again, and due to the fact that the hash my plugin makes almost certainly wouldn't be identical to the one ADE would create, that would be another thing Adobe could use to detect this.
I don't think it's worth the effort, considering it does increase the chances of Adobe detecting what you do.
What I could try doing would be to import an existing authorization for an eReader. Some/most/all (not looked into that much) eReaders seem to do the same thing my plugin does and just dump all the data into files once, so if the Adobe authorization data is visible to the user through the USB filesystem, then they could potentially be imported into the plugin.
Of course you should only do that if you have an eReader that's capable of turning ACSMs into EPUBs. Would be pretty easy to detect if a Sony PRS-T1 - which does not have any capability to fulfill ACSM files - would suddenly start sending requests to Adobe to fulfill an ACSM file (with these requests actually coming from Calibre instead).
Given that you can call Adobe to have that limit reset, and given that you could also just make a new dummy AdobeID if you're using DeDRM, I don't think it's worth all the effort. The only issue / potential problem with this method (dummy ADE ID) would be if you're buying books from publishers that enforce the new, uncracked DRM, then the books would be stuck on the dummy account.