Blocking the telemetry of Adobe apps
45 comments
·February 7, 2025rpastuszak
tristor
I see you recommend CaptureOne to replace Lightroom. My wife is currently trying out CaptureOne, and my biggest issue is that it has such a different UX.
I would love to ditch Lightroom, because I don't even use it for editing, I only use it for digital asset management/cataloguing, I do all my RAW edits from DxO Photo Lab, but I have thousands of raw images in my Lightroom catalog, just for this year so far.
Unfortunately, all the alternatives I try have such a fundamentally different UX, especially when it comes to the export/import flow for third-party editing tools, that I haven't yet been able to get anything to fit my workflow.
rpastuszak
Yup, had the same problem and decided to bite the bullet with CO. The OSS alternatives weren't that good at the time I made the switch, but maybe they've improved?
I remember hearing something about Darktable splitting into two separate projects, one with a better UX? (I'm probably wrong re the details, on the phone atm)
Ironically importing 40k or so photos from my old catalog into CO took just a fraction of time needed by LR to do the same. That was one of the triggers to stick with it for a few more days.
tristor
I haven't yet tried CaptureOne myself, so maybe I'll just give it a go. My wife got her license included with her camera purchase. Do you happen to know if it's fairly fully functional in the trial period, or am I going to have to shell out for it and hope for the best? My wife is also on Windows, and I'm on a Mac, so I don't know if that will end up with a better UX or not.
I would really like to get rid of Lightroom. I pay right now for the CC Photography Plan, and I /only/ use Lightroom Classic and nothing else, and I only use it as a DAM, everything else is done in DxO Photo Lab or Photomatix anyway.
_boffin_
Was using Darktable last night. Awful ui/ux compared to Lightroom. I really do love Lightroom, but despise Adobe and their ways.
lofaszvanitt
lightroom's UI/UX is trash compared to captureone, your productivity will skyrocket once you get to know C1. the company has lots of good videos where you can learn the whole program in 1-2 days.
_boffin_
Please expand on why Lightroom’s UI is trash compared to CaptureOne. Just went to C1’s site and their vibe is more of a polished darktable than the polished golden turd Lightroom is.
Mashimo
It's sad that CaptureOne now cost 350 USD and you will not get any updates :(
lofaszvanitt
they have lot of 50% off deals throughout the year, especially towards the end of the year
null
rpastuszak
Yeah, I got it with a discount (Black Friday IIRC). I'm still on an older version but it works perfectly fine with all of my cameras, I don't see a reason to update.
neya
I understand not everyone is able to get rid of Adobe and their eco-system immediately, but I had the last straw after 1) they slapped a cloud integration on top of perfectly working offline softwares and labelling it Creative Cloud, fucking over existing customers who had prepaid offline licenses and 2) they got hacked and a lot of their customers's credit card info was stolen and many of them had fraudulent transactions on their cards (including mine). They didn't even do a proper disclosure until it blew right in their face.
I thought they would have changed by now, several years later. Turns out, they secretly modified the TOS to steal their customers' intellectual property - content the customers have invested 1000s of dollars into, simply because of the usage of creative cloud to train their AI models. That too, blew up in their face. I am not sure why anyone would even trust or use Adobe in 2025. Honestly.
I have since then switched to the Affinity Suite (serif.com) and never looked back. So, for what it's worth, fuck Adobe and I hope they burn to the ground with their scammy practices.
Tommix11
I don't think anyone in their right mind has ever trusted Adobe, they were like this in the 80's too.
surfingdino
You forget content "moderation" with AI, which can result in getting banned from using Adobe products and reported to the authorities if their AI "thinks" you are breaking law.
neya
Damn, I didn't know this!
egeozcan
Affinity Photo is amazing. I'll never switch back to Photoshop, but I also wish it loaded a bit more quickly (solid 15 seconds on a pc with an SSD and a 3950x. not that PS was much better or anything, but one can wish).
alkonaut
There's telemetry in adobe products that you can't just disable in the app instead of blocking it?
And if there is telemetry that they don't want people to be able to disable for whatever reason, then why would they even separate the servers for it? Why not then just have the license servers and the telemetry servers be the same endpoint so if you block it you aren't running the app at all?
actionfromafar
Could be any number of answers, maybe the tracking is outsourced to another division or company altogether without shared infrastructure.
alkonaut
You could still just proxy everything through a single endpoint. I honestly don't know why people would run software that phones home to function, yet are worried that it phones home...
actionfromafar
I'm just saying large corps move incredibly slowly, especially across internal silos. A big effort just to deter a couple of users fiddling with their network settings.
chrisandchris
Meanwhile at Microsoft: Hold my beer [1]! (I'm still looking for the button that disables Microsoft Telemetry, and we don't even know fully what data they collect).
There might be some legal aspect to it when licensing and telemtry are on the same server, but IANAL.
[1] https://github.com/vavavr00m/WindowsTelemetry/blob/main/bl.t...
zeeZ
That list contains a lot of Microsoft services and login urls and seems to be more than just telemetry, though
chrisandchris
Possibly, idk. I'm using some variant of these lists in my personal DNS host and never had issues when using Microsoft products.
alkonaut
Do you mean windows telemetry, or telemetry for other products? because I think this is a per product affair
xp84
Can someone who knows something about this explain why they need about 3000 random gibberish hostnames for some simple “telemetry”? If my boss asked me to add “telemetry” to a piece of software I would send all the tracking calls to first-party-telemetry.companyname.com, and if I needed thousands of servers (!) for some reason, a simple load balancer or just round robin dns would do fine.
This BS on the other hand looks like they know these thousands will get blocklisted and they plan to just rotate to a new set. The only way this could look more like malware would be if they used random-looking domains instead of just the subdomains.
sonu27
You can use NextDNS, they have lists which are automatically updated
ptx
What happens if you remove its access to the Internet entirely? Does it refuse to work?
An offline VM seems like the only safe way to run modern proprietary software.
ruined
guess they're running the generator again tomorrow
tjpnz
No way to wildcard `adobestats.io` without dnsmasq?
justsomehnguy
in the default Windows install?
Don't think so. Otherwise there is always Unbound.
Tarq0n
I like portmaster for this on windows.
throw0101d
In addition to ads, perhaps Pi-hole should have a database for telemetry as well.
self_awareness
It's probably a violation of their EULA.
Why are you continuing using the app if you don't agree with their EULA?
actionfromafar
At least for consumer software, an EULA is quite literally "throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks in whatever jurisdiction".
self_awareness
Yeah.
"I don't care what the EULA is, I just throw money at the company who has written it."
and later
"OMG they are raping me with their EULA! Halp!"
tjpnz
Some people might not have a choice. Also, fuck their EULA.
self_awareness
Yay, ye old "i don't like these rules therefore I fuck the rules" argument. Love it!
btw, step 2 is always "OMG that guy doesn't like my rules. Fuck that guy!"
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
EULAs means nothing some countries.
self_awareness
It's not enforceable, but EULA is still: "this is the software we made, here are our expectations for the software, this is what you should give us for the right to use the software". And by buying the software you say: "I agree to exchange our expectations about the software."
and later you say
"Hey, you can't force me, fuck you!"
like_any_other
And a country's laws are "here are the expectations how companies should behave in our country", yet companies routinely violate those and write extortionate EULAs that ask for more than they legally can, using their team of lawyers to create a legal knot that they expect lay users to untangle.
Fuck them, and fuck the idea that contracts are morally superior to laws. We see how contracts (and EULAs) are used.
I maintain a list of Adobe alternatives here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/alternatives-to-adobe/
I had been using Adobe since Photoshop 5.5, but ditched it a couple of years ago and I’ve never looked back.