The mere act of “checking in” lets Apple know that I’m here and I’m running 10.4.7. I can’t see that anything at all is being sent back to Apple, but that’s sort of not the point. The second appears to be empty but its header values may convey something of interest to Apple’s client.

The first appears to be a public key or something. Every time it phones home, it requests the following two URLs:

So far as I can tell, the activity from Apple is in this case pretty tame. I figure if anybody is going to be chatting behind my back I at least want to know the gist of what they’re saying. When I see an unusual connection being requested, I often allow it to take place, but not before switching to the Terminal and starting up tcpdump so I can scrutinize the traffic. One of the nice things about Little Snitch is it gives you a chance to “perk up your ears” to what’s being said between the client and server. If I didn’t run Little Snitch I wouldn’t have any idea this was going on, because Apple made no point of informing me of the new feature and what it would entail. This phoning home is done by a new process called “dashboardadvisoryd.” I don’t know the exact schedule, but it appears to be very frequent: twice today in a seven hour period. This is how companies, even fairly trustable ones (IMHO) like Apple, make users paranoid and suspicious of them. The problem is this feature popped up without my permission, and there’s no obvious way for me to turn it off.

You can now verify whether or not a Dashboard widget you downloaded is the same version as a widget featured on (before installing it.

In this case it’s ostensibly to provide users with the opportunity to check whether the Dashboard Widgets you download are identical to ones featured on Apple’s site. Lately I’ve heard a lot on technical podcasts about the public outrage over “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” and the fact that it “ phones home” every day.Īpple released Mac OS X 10.4.7 last week, and ever since I installed it, I’ve been noticing Apple’s own modest home phoning behavior.

Setting up mac mail for lunarpages