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Adobe wrote to my hosts file. I've never had an app do this before
- aisignaldev 7mo agoThis is the kind of thing that erodes trust slowly. Most users will never notice, and that's exactly the point. Would be interesting to know if this is documented anywhere in Adobe's ToS or if it's purely undisclosed behavior.
- curt15 7mo agoHow is Adobe modifying a system file at all? Does Adobe run a background process with root privileges?
- BoredPositron 7mo agoAGMServices it's optional but gets shoe horned at install time.
- colejohnson66 7mo agoEven then, the installer itself has administrative access already, should they choose to do it then.
- asdff 7mo agoYup. Just checked. Right now I have "com.adobe.acc.installer.v2" running as root on two threads. The other 3 background processes (at least those with adobe in the name) are under the user. The whole stack is using like 75mb ram at all times. You kill the process they restart. You delete the files from your launchd, open adobe software they come back.
- 10729287 7mo agoThe same Adobe that is squatting my /documents folder on my Mac ?
- jt2190 7mo agoRedditor thenickdude commented: > I found that in my hosts file the other day too, and I investigated to find why they're doing it at all. > They're using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. > When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png > If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect. > They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.
- tdeck 7mo agoThis is clever in a way, but I wonder what the review process looks like on that team (I say that team because my experience at Adobe was that the company is very heterogeneous).
- dagmx 7mo agoThey’re still completely heterogeneous in my experience as someone who works with each of their teams. It’s like talking to completely different companies who have little idea what the others are doing.
- tdeck 7mo agoIt's because Adobe grew through acquisitions and they have a philosophy of "let teams keep working in the way that works for them".
- michaelbuckbee 7mo agoThe underlying intent here (figure out if it's an existing customer of our locally installed apps when they visit our website) doesn't seem bad, but I certainly dislike both the hosts file and localhost detection options. I'm curious if there's a "good" way to do this.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617463
- scottburgess33 7mo ago[dead]
- makeitrain 7mo agoDdev does this too, to set up local domains when you’re offline. Asks for permission at least.
- altairprime 7mo agoSounds like a job for chattr +i, though who knows what will happen someday if a macOS installer script tries to modify it.
- KellyCriterion 7mo agoWell, Tailscale does this during install on Windows :-))
- sapiosenses 7mo agoApparently it's using a rooted background process installed at software installation time. This whole practice needs to be exposed since it essentially gives any piece of software complete control over the machine simply because the user was supposedly asked to "temporarily" provide admin/root access to the installer in order to install some app. But in addition to that, it also installed a rooted background process that essentially grants them access to read/write anything on the machine, forever.