It's odd the platform is never mentioned. I have LR and CC installed (the latter is impossible to remove, IIUC) and no /etc/hosts mods. I'm on macOS.
Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app
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Re: Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app
#12All of the pirated Adobe installs require host file changes to redirect the license calls to local or nonexistent IPs. Maybe by Adobe adding this, it enables them to track pirated installs, since presumably the new host entry would reestablish the creative cloud connection... Would be interesting to hear if any previously working cracked installs were broken...
Actually not 100% correct. AFAIK there are two patches around: an "online" variant that requires a clean host file but has access to more features and the "offline" variant that uses the host file to block traffic like you described.
Re: Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app
#13I was trying to root out Creative Cloud a few weeks back and it just refused to go away. Turns out there's a separate cleaner tool that you have to download to uninstall Creative Cloud:
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/creative-cloud/apps/troubleshoot/...
Re: Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app
#14A couple of other user-hostile Adobe practices I've encountered:
- About 5 years ago I pretty much shat a brick as the person in charge of IT at a healthcare org when I discovered that by default Creative Cloud stored copies of any documents edited within an Adobe cloud account - with no opt-in, and the only way to override on Windows was with a registry hack that IIRC we couldn't automate via Group Policy. Basically "HIPAA Breach As A Service"
- If you want to free yourself from the tyranny of Adobe products and subscriptions, good on you, but: be sure (on Windows at least several years ago) to not uninstall from "Windows Add & Remove Programs"...go through the Adobe un/installers...if you don't you can still remove the apps but they phoned home and we got charged until I re-installed the programs and used the Adobe uninstallers.
Re: Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app
#15I think allowing any software installer to install a persistent/background process with root/admin privs (which is apparently how this works) is a major security problem since it essentially provides full access and control over anything on the device, forever.
I have a feeling there are tons of app installers that do this.