[3form]

I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).

[yabones]

There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.

The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.

[stronglikedan]

It does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).

[GavinAnderegg]

Author here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar.

The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.

[lossyalgo]

OP is using Apple so maybe that's why? I use PS weekly and I've never seen it (or anything else) touch my hosts file on Windows. I just verified - nothing beyond my own entries.

[silon42]

Maybe it's another excuse to not have a Linux port... ("licensing would be impossible")