Dailey News

Gruber fell for what was (in my opinion) a diggbait and techmeme-bait post at Uneasysilence. Here’s the email I sent to him.

Hi John,

Dan, the author, never approved my comment on his site, which was:

It’s just the welcome page, which has embedded flash, which, as explained by a commentor in that same story, uses 2o7 for flash usage statistics. Prove it to yourself, just check the “don’t show again” on the welcome screen, quit, and restart. Boom, no Little Snitch alert for 2o7.

Much like the iPhone IMEI non-story, this story has been written with little research and with a trollish title so as to generate maximum digg and techmeme hits. I hope the Yahoo ads revenue is worth it for you.

Dan also authored that iPhone IMEI non-story mentioned above, so meh, strikes me as just diggbait. The embedded flash on the welcome page is what’s contacting 2o7.net, not the app itself. A packet trace shows this clearly.

12:38:47.746665 IP 192.168.1.103.51075 > 192.168.112.2O7.net.http: P 1:436(435) ack 1 win 65535
E...uE@.@......g.4.....P..1....?P....X..GET /b/ss/mxcentral/1/F.3-fb/s1198874320251.55?[AQB]&purl=mm&pccr=true&c2=ai&c3= 13.0.2&c4=mac&c5=en_US&c6=full&c7=&c8=&c9=ai_13.0.2_mac_en_US_full__[AQE] HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Adobe Flash Player 9
Referer: http://www.adobe.com/startpage/ai_content/ai_1302_full_default.swf?prod=ai&ver=13.0.2&plat=mac&lang=en_US&stat=full&tday=&spfx=&productName=illustrator
X-Flash-Version: 9,0,43,0
Connection: close
Host: 192.168.112.2O7.net

If you bring up the welcome page from the Help menu in Adobe apps, you’ll see the same 2o7.net message.

I think the 192.168 naming is a valid point, but Dan’s title and content are misleading diggbait, IMO.

- Todd

My comment on Dan’s site reads a little more snarky than I intended it, but so be it. Note that 2o7 uses that same server for all flash and flex statistics and also for, as Gruber noted, the iTunes music store. I think the misleading name of the 2o7 server is a somewhat valid point, but like we saw with the iPhone IMEI reporting non-story from Dan at Uneasysilence, there could be a valid reason for the naming. I honestly doubt the name is there to mislead people or get around firewall rules, since 99.9% of web users wouldn’t even know anything about private IP address ranges.