Corporate conspiracies… not
UNEASYsilence published a story two days ago about connections to 2O7.net from Adobe CS3 applications.
It’s scaremongering of the worst sort. The connections to 2O7.net are happening because the splash panel fetches a Flash graphic from Adobe’s website when you start the app. It is used to fill the bottom right corner, like this:
Anyway, when you load that graphic, it connects to Omniture (who own the 2O7.net domain) who provide site access statistics and the like. Big hairy deal.
It simply isn’t, as UNEASYsilence were all too keen to suggest, some sort of devious invasion of privacy on Adobe’s part.
There should be a variant of Hanlon’s Razor to cover this kind of thing. Perhaps something like
Never attribute to privacy infringement that which can be adequately explained by on-line content delivery, statistics gathering or software update.
It’s not quite as succinct now though. We need something snappier (suggestions, anyone?)
Or maybe people should just stop crying wolf every time Little Snitch tells them that an application is accessing the network.
The problem isn't so much that CS3 is phoning home, as it were. The problem is that it is doing so by connecting to a domain name that is obviously designed to fool people into thinking that it is actually an IP address on their local network (i.e. 192.168.*.* addresses are typical of home networks).