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 Apple. Every eight hours, a process called "dashboardadvisoryd" is contacting two different servers hosted by Apple, ostensibly to verify that the Dashboard plug-ins you have installed are the same versions as the ones provided by Apple.

While this certainly isn't as insidious as Microsoft's much-maligned Windows Genuine Advantage program phoning home to verify the authenticity of your operating system's license code, I find myself agreeing with Daniel that Apple 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 Apple'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 discussion with our firewall administrator to explain why our lab computers are all hitting an Apple 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 classroom computers until there's an easier way (other than using Little Snitch) to turn off this phoning home feature.