Interesting, considering one of the ways to prevent Adobe from phoning home was to redirect their domains via hosts file. Perhaps that's where they got the idea, or one of the things they added, like hey were already looking at your hosts file to check for piracy, might as well add some entries for other reasons.
I'm trying to think of legitimate reasons why an installer should be able to edit that file, and I can't think of any. Seems like the OS should lock it down.
I don't use windows that much anymore, but couldn't you make it a read-only file?
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