Mac OS X 10.4.7 Phones Home

Daniel Jalkut has discovered that the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update released last week is causing his computer to phone home to A le. Every eight hours, a proce called "dashboardadvisoryd" is contacting two different servers hosted by A le, oste ibly to verify that the Dashboard plug-i you have i talled are the same versio as the ones provided by A le.

While this certainly i 't as i idious as Microsoft's much-maligned Windows Genuine Advantage program phoning home to verify the authenticity of your operating system's lice e code, I find myself agreeing with Daniel that A le should provide us a way to turn this feature off. For my few computers at home, I doubt that I'll care much whether each is talking to A le's servers, but in my work environment where I manage many hundreds of computers, I now need to evaluate whether this change is going to have a negative effect on my network. I've already got network administrators mistaking Bonjour traffic as PC viruses, the last thing I need is to have another discu ion with our firewall administrator to explain why our lab computers are all hitting an A le server at scheduled periods.

I've been debating all summer whether or not our computers in the Fall would have Dashboard enabled. I have no choice now but to disable Dashboard on our lab and cla room computers until there's an easier way (other than using Little itch) to turn off this phoning home feature.