All Your Hosts Are Belong To Us

Die Zerstörung der eigenen Reputation zu Gunsten kurzfristiger Umsatz- und Gewinnziele ist unter großen Unternehmen ein beliebter Sport, und Adobe (Adobe was, for a long time, beloved.) spielt seit Jahren in der ersten Liga:

If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.

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, they load this image using JavaScript:

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.

Update: Es ist sehr befriedigend, wenn sich eine konsequente Strategie endlich auszahlt:

All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe’s time has come. The Creative Cloud provider’s suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades — despite unpopular decisions to fully embrace generative AI and abandon software licenses in favor of expensive, complicated subscriptions .