Great news! You can opt-out from Omniture’s 192.168.112.2o7.net
Omniture’s disgusting 192.168.112.2o7 tracking url and Adobe CS3’s use of it has been picking up some dirt recently, starting with uneasysilence, and propagated through DF, ZDnet, and more.1 And then it was discovered that the Apple iTunes MiniStore does the same. But ValleyWag gives you the good news:
Don’t want to be their guinea pig? Omniture lets you opt out.
Oh wait, really? You can? That’s great! This opt-out link gives you a cookie called omniture_optout on .2o7.net with a 1 value. But wait, it’s a cookie? That means…
Omniture opt-out explains (emphasis mine):
…it is necessary to install a cookie on your browser. This cookie identifies that you have opted-out. If you delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to opt-out again.
That’s right. Cookies are stored in your browser. So if you opt-out in Safari or FF, will you be opted-out in a CS3 app? Um, no. Or in the iTunes MiniStore? No.
In the case of the MiniStore, you can just turn it off. But in the CS3 case (and for any other apps that build such communications in) things are trickier. As a commenter suggests on the ValleyWag, it looks like Little Snitch is the best way of clearly opting-out of communications like this. Unless, of course, you want to switch to Vista.
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It’s important to give props to our man John Gruber. The ZDNet article jumps on the John Nack train of “you can’t call this disgraceful without looking into it!” But you clearly can see something is suspicious about a
192.168.112.2o7url, which was the main impetus for Gruber’s harsh claims. John Nack hath since repented. ↩
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Tags: Daring Fireball, iTunes
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December 29th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
How to really opt-out: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
(Mac users have to convert the Windows line breaks to Unix line breaks first - eg with the dos2unix tool).
December 30th, 2007 at 2:06 am
You can just nuke it with an entry in /etc/hosts, no?
127.0.0.1 192.168.112.2o7.net
December 30th, 2007 at 4:32 am
All applications that use the networking APIs provided by Foundation, including those that embed WebKit, share the same cookie storage. So it may actually be that opting out of Omniture tracking by setting a cookie in Safari will affect other apps like iTunes. I don’t have CS3 to check whether it uses Foundation, but someone should test this theory. Note that Mozilla-based browsers (e.g. Firefox, Camino) do not share cookies between each other, or with other applications that embed the Gecko engine.
December 30th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Mitcho, the fact that you were referenced on DF reconfirms you as a hero.
December 30th, 2007 at 9:57 am
smfr: Adobe said that CS3 uses an embedded Opera browser. BTW: I don’t think that Safari and iTunes store cookies in the same location on Windows.
December 30th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
[…] vigilen lo que haces a través de empresas de buen nombre: Adobe, y ahora vuelve salir a la luz, iTunes MiniStore. A pesar de que dicen que puedes quitarte de la lista para que no te espíen de la desgracia de la […]
December 30th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Firefox is set to erase all cookies on exit, on all of our computers. So much for their method of opting out.
Just edited my host files.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[…] Mitcho.com points out that you can opt out of 2o7.net tracking, but only by setting a browser cookie, which won’t have any effect within apps like iTunes and Photoshop CS3. That site suggests a third-party solution for preventing apps from connecting to Omniture’s servers. But there is an easier way, at least on OS X. […]
December 30th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Here’s another way of opting out of the 2o7.net scam that’s free and works for all apps. (Tested on OS X, I believe there’s a similar way of doing things on Windows too.)
http://dev.netcetera.org/blog/2007/12/30/opting-out-of-omnitures-1921681122o7net-the-geeky-way/
Cheers!
Simon
January 1st, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Just turn off the Welcome panel (it isn’t the CS3 apps talking to Omniture; it’s the web content loaded into the Welcome window). No need to screw around with firewall settings etcetera.
January 1st, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Even easier:
sudo route add -net 216.52.17 127.0.0.1
This will cause all possible hosts within the 2o7.net network to be routed to your local machine, which will go nowhere, so you’re protected against more than just 192.168.112.2o7.net.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
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