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.
↫ thenickdude at Reddit
At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?
This is reminiscent of the Sony/BMG rootkit fiasco from the mid-2000s. While editing the hosts file is not exactly a rootkit-level exploit, it is still something that should never, ever be touched by third party software; the vast majority of Windows/Mac users themselves don’t even know what it is or what it does.
In this age of vibe-coded bullshit, I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of system level modification ends up resulting in a corrupted OS installation and data loss when a commercial software company can’t be bothered to QC their Claude-vomited code and it modifies something more vital than the hosts file in the name of copy protection.
Morgan,.
Yes, those were the days.
Every* software wanted to take full ownership of your machine. They had the audacity to assume superiority over the user and other software already installed.
(Splash screens, notification icons, task bar pins, …)
But in theory Windows with built in DRM was supposed to bring order to the zoo. Yet, just like Steam’s strong protections were not enough, 3rd party still pushes for garbage protection schemes.
Ah, I would say we had plenty of bulls**t before vibe coding. Remember the StackOverflow “copy-paste” era? Even before that developers would just paste something that seems to pass, and wanted to push that through.
AI just amplified it. Bad programmers become worse, good programmers become even better.
Stuff like this should be outright illegal. Period.
Adobe has no business modifying system-level files. Period.