I haven’t used Photoshop in my Windows machine for a while. I only used it to do occasional stuff to my photos that simple photo editors cannot do.
When I opened the app, I was greeted with a banner and a dialogue box stating “this Adobe app is non-genuine and will be disabled soon”. (Both were written in Japanese though the original app’s language is set to English. I think it has something to do with my VPN.) I couldn’t figure what the buttons said but one seems to redirect me to an Adobe subscription page and the other simply closes the app.
I don’t have experience pirating stuff like this. I got help from another friend long ago in downloading the whole suite of Adobe products from what I think is a Russian source. I am pretty sure they told me to set up firewall restrictions for the app as well, and I haven’t touched the installer or anything similar since then. I don’t know if there is something I can do about this or if I should download an ‘updated version’ of the app from some other source.
Adobe uses an exe file of Node.js to do the verification. It is situated in the Adobe installation directory. Block all outbound connections from this exe.