Adobe wrote to my hosts file
80 points by ohrv
80 points by ohrv
And why: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1sb6hzk/comment/oe1ap9h/
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.
Wow. I’m no web expert but I expect that any website can use this to detect a Creative Cloud install.
No, further down the thread someone points it it checks the origin header.
Ah I didn’t delve that deep into the Reddit thread. I suppose a timing leak could still do it. As in the DNS lookup failure is consistently slower/faster than the origin check. At any rate, what were they thinking…
That IP address 166.117.29.222 belongs to Amazon and they’ve wired it into a very large number of customer machines in a way that’s very hard to change. That’s a significant risk of hilarious cockups.
What, are you implying Adobe didn’t think this shenanigan through before rolling it out? </s>
There’s no reason for an app on macOS to need an installer, let alone an admin password, but the morons at these companies keep doing both and so normalize both. Which then lets them pull this kind of garbage.
Things like the hosts file (and similar) should be gated by sip or full disk access to prevent this kind of garbage.
And of course a company should not be able to ToS its way out of liability when this garbage is used to exploit people’s systems.
With this in mind... does anyone know of a feature-similar vector editor to Illustrator that runs on Linux? Affinity Designer is pretty good but cannot run through Wine (haven't tried their MacOS version with a translation layer, that's an idea). I've tried many times to learn Inkscape and failed, I think there's something too different about the workflow.
I hear Affinity actually works pretty well through Wine, see e.g. https://affinity.liz.pet for a guide.
I attempted this and it seems to solve the "cannot even run" but tried and failed over the better part of 4 hours trying to get breaking graphics glitches stopped... the support Discord server is not active.
There is Graphite to have a look at at least. Might not be feature complete as of yet (haven't tried it for a few months), but seems to get there rather quick and seems to go in a good direction.
https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite https://graphite.art/
I just tried using this for a project I've had on my docket for a while and it worked great. Thanks for the recommend, I'm very surprised this didn't come up in my searching. Is web search dead? Who can say.
When I'm using a Linux desktop as a primary machine, use Affinity Designer on my iPad and am happy with that. But it's not a part of my daily workflow. I basically do programmer-art. Have you tried with winapps or winboat?
winapps has always seemed a little jank to me, it doesn't seem to cooperate with tiling window managers (or at least sway) and winboat is electron if I'm remembering correctly. For the few windows apps I need on occasion I'll usually spin up a vm with qemu + podman and just rdp into that. I've generally had a good experience with responsiveness / latency but I wouldn't use it for anything gpu accelerated--the same applies to winapps/winboat to my understanding however.
Here's the thing: Coding is already a pile of hacks before we add vibecoding.
