hosts Files ⇥ reddit.com

LordPan1492 on Reddit is, I think, the first person to have spotted this:

We notices since last week Friday that some devices has altered hosts files. Adobe still says that everything in the host file referring Adobe should be removed (to remove all license avoidance lines). But I know have 3 lines added to the hosts file, and I think if I’m starting to remove them, they will be re-added later.
## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - Start ##

166.117.29.222 detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com

## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - End ##

User thenickdude, in response, with more detail in a second post:

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed, from on their website.

Michael Tsai is among many people who have found the same is true on their Macs. For whatever reason, my hosts file has not been mucked with by Adobe.

In his headline, Tsai says this is “for their analytics”, but I do not think that is right. I spent a little time digging into this today and, while I have nothing concrete, I expect this is for integrations between web apps and the company’s desktop apps. In Adobe Express — free web apps for a handful of common image and PDF editing tasks — there are at least two JavaScript files containing references to a ccdDetectUtil, presumably standing for “Creative Cloud Desktop detection utility”. If the user has the desktop apps installed, it appears to suggest the Express app, too, and I am guessing this also powers a thing where you can update a Creative Cloud desktop app by clicking a button on the web.

I could not get any of this stuff to trigger, even by manually adding the entry to my /etc/hosts file. Also, this is not a defence of Adobe. There should be no tolerance for this kind of meddling with system files. If Adobe wants to have these kinds of integrations, that is what a custom URL protocol is for.