I can choose whether to tolerate a site’s advertising, but I do object to silent tracking by sites. So instead of going for an all-out ad blocker, I have been using the excellent free tracker blocker Better, by ind.ie, which is available from the App Store.

It does have some strange side-effects, though. Noting that my Adobe Flash Player is kept up to date, I turned to look at those other Adobe runtime environments, Adobe Air and Shockwave Player. Although there isn’t much use for them, I should at least keep them up to date, or remove them altogether.

But when I tried to download them, Adobe bounced me into a page trying to get me to take out a CC subscription. I thought that their site was just a little broken, and tried again. It turns out that – while Adobe will happily deliver you the current Flash Player installer when your browser blocks trackers, it refuses to co-operate over Air or Shockwave Player.

So if you have Better, or another tracker blocker, active in your browser, you will need to turn that off before getting the latest release of Adobe Air from here, or of Adobe Shockwave Player from here.

It’s a bit grubby of Adobe to require tracking to be allowed before you can download free security updates, don’t you think?