Posted by rglullis 1 hour ago
The fact that this is largely seen as acceptable or even sensible is rather silly in this day and age.
For anyone hand-wringing over this, this used to be normal. The hosts file was invented a decade before DNS. The end user, or app, would edit their hosts file purposefully after downloading a master copy from the Stanford Research Institute which was occasionally updated.
People editing hosts files for other reasons was normal (a long time ago-- and it stopped being normal for valid reasons, as tech evolved and the shortcomings of that system were solved). A program automatically editing the hosts file and its website using that to detect information about the website visitor is not the same thing; that usage is novel and was never "normal."
This claim strikes me as obviously wrong.
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Oh helllll no. Let's imagine an analogy for Adobe leadership:
1. You hired a night janitor to clean and vacuum your executive offices.
2. That janitor secretly stops at every desk-phone to alter the settings of voicemail accounts.
3. After the change, any external caller can dial a certain sequence to get a message of "Yes, this office was serviced by Adobe Janitorial!"
What's your reaction when you discover it? Do you chuckle and say something like "boys will be boys"? No! You have a panic-call, Facilities revokes access, IT starts checking for other unauthorized surprises, HR looks into terminating contracts, and Legal advises whether you need to pursue data-breach notifications or lawsuits or criminal charges.
* Is it acceptable because they had some permission to touch objects in the rooms? No.
* Is it acceptable because the final effect is innocuous? No.
* Is it acceptable because the employment contract had some vague sentence about "enhancing office communication experiences"? No.
* Is it acceptable if they were just dumb instead of malicious? No.
No person that would blithely cross those lines can be trusted near your stuff, full-stop.
> 3. After the change, any external caller can dial a certain sequence to get a message of "Yes, this office was serviced by Adobe Janitorial!"
Theoretically, it's not "any external caller." Only the janitor's department calling in can dial that sequence and get "Yes, you serviced this office!" If anyone else tries to dial the extension, the desk-phone pretends it doesn't know what it means. (Because it seems Adobe's server serving the analytics image checks the request origin and only serves the image if the origin is Adobe's own website.)
The origin "security" doesn't excuse the complexity and the potential for both exploits and human-error breakage in the future.
Is this the case though? Cannot any website use the same trick Adobe does to check whether you have Creative Cloud installed? Like, the entries in /etc/hosts are not magically scoped to work just on Adobe's web, no?
I must be missing something.