I have been an Adobe user since 1996. Starting with Photoshop 3. Then, using the rest of their programs since 1999.

Between this and the fact that they've just 1. Changed all the old accounts to "Adobe Creative Cloud Pro" 2. DOUBLED the monthly fee, now charging you for the AI features whether you want them or not, and 3. Removed any tiers that have full program access but no AI, I am walking away forever when my current month expires.

Not to mention, students now only get the old $19.99 membership for the first year.

I teach visualization and representation tools to architecture students. I had always taught them Adobe products before. Now I can't in good faith sign them up to have their expertise tied to using this program stack forever. So tomorrow I am giving them a lecture on free to use and FOSS versions of the same tools. And I'm going to teach the class from them in perpetuity. Congratulations, Adobe that's 50+ students a year who won't be using your products when they graduate.

As a general principle, application developers should not have free rein to modify my system's configuration, and OS's should do their part to make it very difficult for developers. Installing your binaries into C:\Program Files\AppName or /usr/local/bin? Fine. Dumping crap all over C:\Windows or /usr or /boot or something? No way--the OS should make the developer obtain my consent (not just a blanket sudo-like escalation) to do these things. Sneakily modifying /etc/hosts to act against me? Get the hell outta here!

Oh well, as a teenager, blocking adobe servers in hosts file was how you got to "phone activation" and could generate a code. So I guess we're even, heh.

How is defender not flagging this? Changing hosts file should raise alarms

I don't know whether is still does this, but 8-9 years ago I discovered that Acrobat overwrites the COM registry entries for Microsoft Active Accessibility (oleacc.dll) such that any application attempting to instantiate MSAA gets the Adobe DLL instead of the system DLL. This actually broke the stuff I was working on and had to override it in my app manifest to forcibly use the system version.

I inquired about it and got some BS about how they absolutely _had_ to do this to intercept MSAA instantiations across the system, when in reality they were using a global solution to solve a local problem.

I'd like to answer the closing question

> At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?

The vast majority of commercial software is malware.

Adobe really relishes being a villain. I don't understand how one company can be so anti-consumer.

Whether it's run as root/administrator or not - you can disable this behavior by setting the immutable flag on /etc/hosts. No user, including root, can write to a file with the immutable flag set(although root could _remove_ the attribute and then write).

Recycling a comment from prior discussion (4 days, 68 points, 13 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617463

_______

Oh helllll no. Let's imagine an analogy for Adobe leadership:

1. You hired a night janitor to clean and vacuum your executive offices.

2. That janitor secretly stops at every desk-phone to alter the settings of voicemail accounts.

3. After the change, any external caller can dial a certain sequence to get a message of "Yes, this office was serviced by Adobe Janitorial!"

What's your reaction when you discover it? Do you chuckle and say something like "boys will be boys"? No! You have a panic-call, Facilities revokes access, IT starts checking for other unauthorized surprises, HR looks into terminating contracts, and Legal advises whether you need to pursue data-breach notifications or lawsuits or criminal charges.

* Is it acceptable because they had some permission to touch objects in the rooms? No.

* Is it acceptable because the final effect is innocuous? No.

* Is it acceptable because the employment contract had some vague sentence about "enhancing office communication experiences"? No.

* Is it acceptable if they were just dumb instead of malicious? No.

No person that would blithely cross those lines can be trusted near your stuff, full-stop.

I installed Creative Cloud just last week. No such entry was created in the hosts file on my macOs system.

Honestly, I've been dealing with crap like this for so many decades that I'm a fervent supporter of every "installer" just showing and logging a Git PR-styled diff to the user of every file and system change, everywhere in the system, complete with the ability to rollback from it.

I am tired of inconsistent logging, opaque system changes, and vendors generally being malicious with endpoint security in the name of protecting profit.

Screw the "show me the log" option that scrolls by in a flash and you can't get back to, show me the damn diff first.

I owe thousands of dollars to amtlib.dll.

If you don't like Adobe modifying your hosts file then I'd not use them. The checking for the software this way is kinda interesting though.

If you have ever used certain pirated Adobe software, you would have realized this very early on: you can only use it while offline. Otherwise, it constantly throws up pop-ups that block it from launching, even if you try hard to modify the network settings.

Would it be possible (practical) to uniquely identify large numbers of users and even bypass anonymization efforts like tor and VPNs with this?

Yearly reminder that Adobe CC is malware. Open your Activity Monitor on your Mac and see how much craps CC run on your computer

Adobe has been user hostile since Create Suite launched. Where were you? They have been hiding backdoors in windows machines and Mac machines since at least 2010.

So can I fool the website that I have CC installed?

Browsers could still do something about mixed Internet and LAN/Localhost requests by IP address regardless of the domain name.

Looks like they got a wildcard certificate for *.creativecloud.adobe.com[0] so that the HTTPS connection works and so they don't have to publish DNS records for the "detect-ccd" subdomain to obtain a cert. Pretty neat setup, but also kinda hacky.

0: https://crt.sh/?q=creativecloud.adobe.com

To be fair, to crack all adobe products requires a few reg keys. It's wild that they have just given up on pirates.

Can't even reproduce it when setting location to Belgium, or CA or AZ.

I must be missing something.

The most difficult of tasks is trying to un-unstall this pos app on windows.

what happens if you happen to use a DNS server that resolves this domain to the correct IP?

There are no suspicious entries in my /etc/hosts just what I put there.

Are we sure this is to detect Creative Cloud instead of, trying to detect whether you have/had a pirated version of Adobe installed? Some reference material I've seen often involved blackholing adobe hosts to prevent installation software from verifying or otherwise talking to adobe.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617463

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624990

Honestly a pretty nifty way to detect if it's installed. I'm sure this can power a lot of nice features, like linking directly into adobe products if they're installed.

I vote we all add that HOSTS entry to poison their despicably dark-pattern detection algorithm.

As much as I dislike what AI slop is doing to visual design, I wouldn’t mind seeing Adobe get hurt for being the comically terrible company it is.

Make affinity sound like a smarter and smarter choice.

[dead]

> for a very stupid reason.

I cannot stomach Thom's articles. So borderline judgmental, holier than thou, feels like he only writes whenever there's something to criticize.

No, it's not a stupid reason. Reason is OK, the execution is controversial.