OS X Phones Home; Apple is spying on you

The new OS X update 10.4.7 has been found to phone home. It's nothing like the recent news about Windows XP that phones home all the time to find out whether or not your copy of Windows XP is valid, even if it has already determined that it is valid. With Apple's OS X update it's not so bad, whenever you launch the OS X Dashboard it checks to see if you have the most recent version of your installed widgets. I would call it a feature. Other people would call it spyware. In a way I agree that they should have asked me if I'd like to enable this new feature available in 10.4.7. The next time I launch OS X's Dashboard a window could have popped up to say "OS X can check to make sure you have the most up to date versions of your widgets. Would you like to automatically connect to the internet periodically to check?" Now would that be so hard?

MacOSXHints has posted a workaround to make it not connect to the internet if you are that much against it. It is a little involved so if you are not comfortable with the command line I'd suggest waiting for the enevitable update that will let you choose wheter or not to connect. MacOSXHints says to do this:

Login with an administrative account and open Terminal, then execute the following command:

$ sudo vi /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist

When asked for a password, retype your own password to verify that it's still you and not someone else. Next type an i to enter input mode, and add the following two lines below the line that reads <dict>:

        <key>Disabled</key>
        <true/>

Press Escape to leave the edit mode and type :wq, followed by Enter, to save the file and quite the editor. The file is saved and mach_init.d won't start this process anymore. Now type the following command:

$ sudo vi 
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch.plist

and enter input mode once again by pressing i, and after the line that reads <dict>, we also add the lines:

        <key>Disabled</key>
        <true/>

Leave the input mode and save the file as before. Now restart your computer, and this process won't start automatically.

Thanks MacOSXHints!



Tagged with Computer, OSX, Mac, Spy