World Of Tricks

Dan Moren of Uneasy Silence first posted about the apparent data sniffing on Wednesday night. Using a program for Mac OS called Little Snitch, he was able to discover Adobe's hidden practice.

The data transmission was discovered in Adobe InDesign CS3 for Mac.In any case, at first glance the address may look like a IP address, and a local one if that. In many routers, 192.168.xxx.xxx is used for internal networking. However this address looks different.Data is sent to 192.168.112.2O7.net.

Two things would appear immediately awry to the experienced eye: first, no IP address includes any alphabetic characters in it, this address includes the letter 'O' in place of a zero. Second, it ends in '.net,' and no IP address ends in any kind of DNS suffix.

So where does this data apparently go? Loading up the address itself in a web browser takes the surfer to a page owned by Ominture, a large web analytics company."Yes, Adobe is watching how many times you open your programs. Adobe is spying on users application habits," Moren wrote.

Apparently, Adobe has already addressed this through an article on its Devnet site. It says it uses Omniture to track usage of an application to 'create better user experiences.'

Everyone knows that adobe flash is spyware,google toolbar is spyware, free firewalls and antivirals are spywares too. I see we're back on the privacy kick once again. If you're connected to the net you don't have any privacy. If you think you do, you're exceedingly naive. Slashdot had an article about cable and DSL suppliers monitoring their customers use of bit torrent for file sharing and shutting down those who do. That means you are being watched. If that scares you, you need to stop using your computer. There are way too many people on the net anyway.