“License Expired. Licensing for this product has expired.” – Adobe CS4, 2009

Jun 29, 2018 Little Snitch is a popular Mac app that detects outbound connections and lets you set up rules to block those connections. Once installed, Little Snitch monitors your internet traffic and every time it detects an outbound connection, for example, Adobe Reader trying to access the internet, it pops up a window and ask.

In ‘Defeating the Adobe CS4 ‘License Expired’ dialog in OS X’ we explained how to reset the registration and serial number of the CS4 Suite.

In this post we describe how to shut CS4 up. If your Adobe apps are allowed to communicate with or ping the Adobe mother ship, or activate.abobe.com, any new serial numbers you enter will ultimately be rejected. So we must block the CS4 apps making outbound network connections to the Internet.

• Arnaldur if you need to block Adobe, then you only need to make ONE rule! Remember, you can block applications. In addition to that, you can also edit your hosts file to block Adobe calls if that is what you need to do. However, Windows Firewall will work just fine for that too. May 13, 2012 at 12:58 PM.
• Little Snitch - a few of the Edgesuite calls on one week fresh install! Little Snitch is free for 3 hour periods at a time so it can be installed to test and find out what domains you'd like to be blocking. For long term blocking of nasty sites OS X, your solutions are threefold: buy an outgoing firewall, i.e.
• The Mac OS X firewall can block some or all inbound connections. However, to be 100 percent secure, the vigilant Mac OS X user should also monitor and manage outbound connections. Little Snitch is.
• This is where Little Snitch. Little Snitch is a favourite Mac program that finds outbound connections and allows you to set up rules to block these links. Once set up, Little Snitch monitors your online visitors and each time it finds an outbound link, by way of instance, Adobe.

We will describe two methods in OS X for preventing CS4 pinging the Adobe activation servers.

The first is to use Little Snitch, an app for OS X that creates rules for blocking the outbound communication of apps and services. The drawback here is that Little Snitch is commercial software, although Pirate Bay might disagree, and that it is a heavy handed means of shutting only a couple of applications up.

The second method for blocking the chatter between CS4 apps and the Adobe activation servers on your mac is to edit the hosts file (/etc/hosts). There are several apps that can be used to edit the hosts file. At this time I recommend using the updated TextEdit approach (Oct 6 2009). See TextEdit instructions below and also comment #249:

– HostsWidget

– Gas Mask 0.4

-Terminal. You can use a Terminal text editor like emacs, vi, nano and pico or you can add individual entries to the hosts file by issuing the following command in Terminal:

echo “127.0.0.1 adobe.activate.com” >> /etc/hosts

In the above command we have added an entry for adobe.activate.com. You can replace adobe.activate.com with the other domains in the list and add all the domains individually.

To be sure the entries were successfully added to the hosts file run the following command to look at the hosts file:

cat /etc/hosts

TEXTEDIT UPDATE!!! OCT 6 2009 – The following instructions for the use of TextEdit have been updated, see comment #249. It details a more direct approach for editing the hosts file with root privileges by issuing the following command:

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts

and then simply follow steps 8, 9 and 10. That’s it!

The following instructions for TextEdit are now deprecated. See the new ones as stated above.

– TextEdit. To edit the hosts file in TextEdit we must do so from within the root account. In OS X the root account is disabled by default so the first step is to enable the root user in OS X. Quit all Adobe apps, then;

1. Open Directory Utility (/Applications/Utilities)

2. Enable the Root User (Edit > Enable Root User)

3. Choose a password for the root account

4. Logout of your admin account.

5. Login to the root account. Select ‘Other’ in the Login Window. The name of the account is root (lowercase).

6. In Finder menu > Go > Go To Folder. Type /etc and click ‘OK’

7. Ctrl-click the hosts file and ‘Open With’ TextEdit.

8. Copy/Paste the following entries to the hosts file, making sure all the copied entries are pasted in between the ebtries “255.255.255.255 broadcasthost”
and “::1 localhost” (see pic):

Use Little Snitch To Block Adobe Hosts

127.0.0.1 adobe.activate.com
127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 3dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-2.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 adobe-dns-3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 ereg.wip3.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sea.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 wwis-dubc1-vip60.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate-sjc0.adobe.com

9. The hosts file will now look something like this (note how the entries were pasted between “255.255.255.255 broadcasthost” and “::1 localhost”):

10. Save the changes. Quit TextEdit.

11. Logout of the root account.

12. Login to your admin account

13. Open Directory Utility (/Applications/Utilities)

14. Disable the Root User (Edit > Disable Root User)

15. Quit Directory Utility

16. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and type:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache (10.5)
sudo lookupd –flushcache (10.4)

17. Enter your admin password when prompted.

18. Relaunch Adobe apps. Enter your serial. Done.

Use Little Snitch To Block Adobe Host Settings

In this day and age, running a computer without some kind of an outgoing firewall is like driving your car with your eyes closed.

There are so many malfeasors – from phishers to corporate spies – trying to track you and place you and grab you every time you check your email or you browse the web, that everyone needs a firewall.

You can test this on OS X by installing Little Snitch and scrolling through your messages. A few of the outgoing calls are for innocent images, mainly they are for tracking tags and tracking images.

Little Snitch – a few of the Edgesuite calls on one week fresh install!

Little Snitch is free for 3 hour periods at a time so it can be installed to test and find out what domains you’d like to be blocking.

For long term blocking of nasty sites OS X, your solutions are threefold:

1. buy an outgoing firewall, i.e. Little Snitch. A bit pricey at $30 a license but it’s Little Snitch or go hungry
2. configure your hosts file to block most of the major offenders (people do keep lists)
3. use GlimmerBlocker control panel to block the baddies via internal proxy (works on all browsers)

Of the three, GlimmerBlocker was the best and the simplest. Until after a year and a half GlimmerBlocker decided to seize up and prevent me from editing WordPress sites. Apparently it’s database got full or something. I lost eight hours trying to troubleshoot this mystery when I desperately needed to work so GlimmerBlocker is banned now. A pity as GlimmerBlocker is free.

A hosts file is also great. By adding bad sites to the hosts file and redirecting them to localhost (127.0.0.1) you stop them dead in their tracks.

One of the more complete lists of domains to block via hosts is kept online here: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

To edit your hosts file on OS X, the quickest way is to use Terminal to give TextEdit root access to the hosts file.

1. Open a terminal window and type the following: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts
2. Hit return and enter your admin password when prompted and again hit return.
3. Your Hosts file should automatically open in TextEdit.
4. Copy the hosts from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt or ssomewhere else (mvps wastes a lot of space on the x-rated zone for those of us not into: alternative suggestions to mvps welcome)
5. Paste it into your text hosts file.
6. Save.
7. Test that hosts is working by browsing to one of the domains listed in mvps.
8. Continue to edit and save at your leisure (at each save the hosts file is updated and live: well done Apple).

Unfortunately both LittleSnitch and the hosts file suffer from the same fatal flaw. They don’t allow wildcards. So for instance, one of the worst bits of spyware around is Infusionsoft. Every time you get an email from a subscriber of infusionsoft they want to know if you opened it. Therefore every image is specific to you. But each user has his or her own subdomain, i.e. empowered.infusionsoft.com.

If you block infusionsoft.com in hosts with 127.0.0.1 infusionsoft.com, you will only block the homepage. You would have to block 127.0.0.1 empowered.infusionsoft.com for each and every Infusionsoft subscriber who sends you email.

Little Snitch automates this process and allows you to make the block application specific. I use Apple Mail exclusively as my email client (looks great, full feature set and very fast, btw) so Little Snitch and I pick off these offenders one by one.

What I really want though are wildcards in Little Snitch so that I can ban all infusionsoft.com subdomains with a single *.infusionsoft.com within Apple Mail. The same applies for edgesuite.net within Apple Mail (Edgesuite is for corporate email spies like Apple and eBay, Infusionsoft is for slippery marketers like Rich Schefren and friends like Mike Filsaime).

When is the Objective Development team going to get off their backsides and improve Little Snitch by adding wildcards? There is a three page thread in their forum which goes back to 2004 asking for subdomain blocking in Little Snitch. What’s particularly galling is that ObDev have not even bothered to answer our concerns.

Use Little Snitch To Block Adobe Host File

Until Objective Development add a subdomains/wild card feature to Little Snitch, you may want to hold off on the purchase. Managing outgoing requests one subdomain at a time is very tedious work.

Use Little Snitch To Block Adobe Host Files

In the meantime, if you’d like to block certain domains or you have doubts about a certain piece of software, there is a free solution. You can turn Little Snitch on for three hours while you deal with spam email or install new software, take note of the domains you’d like to block and then add those domains to your hosts file.

Use Little Snitch To Block Adobe Host Download

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.