Adobe Acrobat Reader v6 phone home

[CityK]

I know Blake wrote a while back about his amazement that the Acrobat plugin stays resident in mem even after closing the browser. This is something I don't really like either. However, within the last two weeks I've come across an even more annoying feature of "AcroRd32.exe" - it now wants to phone home (rms.adobe.com, on port 80), for whatever reason. A google search turned up nothing of anyone else reporting such behaviour. So why do I have a sleeper cell in Acrobat?

CK

 

[CougTek]

Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 is a step down version 5.1 in my humble opinion. It loads slower and seems like an overall pain in the ass.

 

[e_dawg]

Do you have the automatic check for updates option enabled in Acrobat? Many programs now have this auto update checker built in and you have to disable them yourself.

 

[CityK]

No, autoupdates was one of the first things I turned off - that is to say I changed it (edit>preferences>updates) to "check for updates manually".

It ran fine previously (except for, as Coug mentions, a little slower then v5), but now it seems to have some urgent need to contact adobe. It was roughly about two weeks ago that my firewall first started alerting me that now whenever the acrord32.exe process is running, it will try to phone home after about a minutes up time. If I manually block the connection then exactly one minute later it will again attempt to phone home, and this endlessly repeats itself (block > 1 minute later phone home > block ....). I'm really surprised I can't find anyone else mention this on the net.

Obviously, configuring an automated always block rule for the FW isn't all that painful. But I'm more curious as to why the app has become maladjusted after ~ 2 months of good behaviour.

 

[e_dawg]

Could it be that you didn't register for it yet? Like Real and other such programs, it will also ask you to register it if you haven't already done so. I am just throwing out ideas, BTW... are you hoping to expose a scandal? :evil:

 

[CityK]

To the best of my knowledge, you don't have to register the free acrobat reader.

are you hoping to expose a scandal?

No.

 

[Howell]

Is it time to whip out the sniffer? And that's not e_dawg or one of our various other canine nick'ed friends.

 

[e_dawg]

To the best of my knowledge, you don't have to register the free acrobat reader.

are you hoping to expose a scandal?

No.

It's time to get the Inquirer on the case

 

[CityK]

Before I uninstalled the "full" v6.0.0 (files dated from May last year) in favour of the "basic" version 6.0.1, I did some checking on this issue:

First off, I changed the firewall rule I had created a while back to inform me whenever this connection was attempted. Then I tried Acrobat with most of the pluggins removed (as outlined in my other Acrobat thread, "Speeding up ..."). Result -> Acrobat no phone home. Add the pluggin's back in and the result -> Acrobat phone home. So it was one of the pluggins. I then quickly tested by removing a few possible offenders, but had no luck as Acrobat still tried to phone home on these attempts. Although I am very puzzled why one of the pluggins wants to phone home and even more so by the fact that I never saw anyone else report this behaviour, this isn't terribly important, and rather then wasting anymore time in tracking down the culprit, I did the sensible thing and moved on to the next task at hand.

Namely, I uninstalled the full version and then installed the basic v6.0.1 and the result was ..... (big suspenseful pause) ... Adobe no phone home. So I'm happy.

I guess the truth is out there, but I'll never know. Here's to hoping the basic version doesn't develop any bad manners over time.

 

[blakerwry]

could be the internet printing?

 

[CityK]

maybe...but we'll never know now

 

[CityK]

Actually, I could restore a ghost image that would still contain the offensive v6.0.0

So if your really curious, I could do it. Otherwise, I think I'm going to let this one slip into oblivion.

 

[sechs]

I talked to someone at Adobe who works on Acrobat. She suggested that it might have to do with rights management, but this isn't her area and can't be sure that's really what it is.

 

[CityK]

Did she provide any theories, or was it more a passing thought.

 

[sechs]

No theories, just a look into the internal documentation made her believe that this may be what it's about.

Note that RMS can stand for rights management server. Like, Microsoft RMS.

 

[psyc0sis]

Over the last 2 months we have noticed that our machines have been doing the same thing. Most machines don't seem to be phoning home all that often, however my machine seems to try and talk to the site every 1 minute (even when i don't have acrobat open).

I would be interested to find out why it is doing it as my internet usage is under the spotlight due to the amount of hits per month to the acrobat site.

Adobe don't seem to be too interested in helping out either, saying they will only provide support for full versions of Acrobat (coincidently the full versions we have here do not genereate this traffic)...

 

[CityK]

psyc0sis, so your using the basic version (6.0.1) and getting this problem?

Since switching from the full version (6.0.0) to the newer, but basic version (6.0.1) I haven't encountered any problems as if yet.

however my machine seems to try and talk to the site every 1 minute (even when i don't have acrobat open)

That's because the AcroRd32.exe process is still running in the background, despite the fact that you have existed the reader in your web browser. If you want, you can kill the process by going into Task Manager (Ctrl-shift-esc), click the Process tab, highlight the offender (AcroRd32.exe), and then end process.

 

[CityK]

I've noticed on the rare occasion that some PDF's trigger acrobat to phone home for updates -- I'm guessing its because of foreign fonts or something. That bugs me enough that it automatically attempts to phone home. But what pisses me off more is that it starts trying to contact a whole variety of IPs.

See if you can generate the same type of behaviour with the following links from google.

PS I have v7.0x lite installed.