Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Can we send acrobats to Iraq?

As to the performers, we'd have to ask Barnum & Bailey - Ringling Bros. about that one.

But ... we can't send Adobe (Acrobat) Reader to Iraq.

I was doing a bunch of Adobe free-product updating this evening: Flash Player 9, Shockwave Player 10, (Acrobat) Reader 7.0.8. (This last, by the way, allowed downloading "just" a patch. The full version is 20 MB. The patch is ... 8 MB. Can you say "bloooooated"? But I digress.)

I passed by, on the Adobe Reader download page, amidst the other legalese, the following routine ominous paragraph, but this time read it more closely:

By downloading or using an Adobe software product you are certifying that you are not a national of Cuba; Iran; Iraq; Libya; North Korea; Sudan; or Syria or any country to which the United States embargoes goods and that you are not a person on the Table of Denial Orders; the Entity List; or the List of Specially Designated Nationals.

Iraq? Our 52nd State? (It had better be, by now. We're pumping as much into it, we "voluntary" taxpayers, each month as we are into Israel, our 51st State, each year.)

Why in blazes can the Iraqis still not legally download Adobe Reader? Haven't they been LIBERATED? Aren't they under the sway of a SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT?

(One that has the Prime Minister of Baghdad's Downtown, er, of Iraq, meekly attending upon the Emperor when he deigns to blitz into town.)

Aren't they allowed to read the U.S. State Department's own puff pieces -- in PDF format, naturally! -- telling them that the civil war they think is crashing down on their heads is just an illusion?

If we were to have 2500 soldiers and Marines die for something, it damn well better be so that Iraqis can legally open their PDF files!!!

It's an outrage, I tell you.

What is the Table of Denial Orders? I think that's the first time I've heard of that one. Its crazy. So, say I have a hotel in one of those countries (Marriott has cut ties with ones we did have but for the sake of argument) and the employees need Adobe Reader to access specific employee info. Can they not because they are a national and "using an Adobe software product" would be required to read it? That's just insane.

Just as an aside. I've made all of our employee policy and procedure info available only in Adobe because, believe it or not, we've had instances of employess changing the text of a signed policy when it was done in Word so they could try and get outside of the policy. They have to work harder now to try that.

This is from the Bureau of Industry and Security, a section of the U.S. Department of Commerce (http://www.bis.doc.gov/index.htm)

DPL- Denied Persons List. A list of persons whose export privileges are currently denied, in whole or in part. (Formerly known as the "Table of Denial Orders")

You'd better hope none of your amateur policy-changers have heard of this little number , L.L.

And it really does work. I've tried it, but haven't bought it yet. (The trial version only copies the first 10 percent of the PDF file.)

Oh, and it's created and sold by a company in the Russian Federation, to get around the contemptible Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The same law that led to one of their programmers' brief imprisonment, when he addressed a conference in Las Vegas on encryption techniques.

Well it wouldn't stop them from having it home and having a copy of the document on their home PC but at work our regular uses don't even have rights to save to their C: drive let alone load software. Not that wouldn't stop those who really want to make changes. They just couldn't do it at work.

I don't get it. Is it Acrobat the company that's denied access to Iraq or the Iraqi people denied access to Acrobat?

Iraq and other countries denied any product that can generate ciphered files using "strong encryption". Since US intelligence cant even handle plain text messages, they cant be expected to this work either.

Of course any idiot with a computer can find strong public/privare key encryption scheme on say "a Russian hacker's site" that woould take the NSA years to crack.