I’ve been reading with some interest all the discussion online regarding Apple’s secret thrice-daily checkup with the mothership to determine if your Dashboard widgets match what Apple has published on it’s own site. I think a good part of this was kicked off by the “Apple Phones Home, Too” article on Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater Blog. At least, I’ve only noticed the other blog posts swirling around the ‘Net after reading his.

I am, however, a little confused, as I run a number of widgets on my Dashboard, but I find no running “dashboardadvisoryd” process running. I, too, run Little Snitch to try to keep an eye on what my computer is doing on the network, and I have not yet been asked what to do about “dashboardadvisoryd”. I even went so far as to explicitly delete all the rules in Little Snitch for the Dock, in case this “phone home” thing was running under the Dock’s name, but still, nothing.

Feeling left out, I decided to see if I really had updated my system. Yup, Software Update says I’m up to date, and About This Mac tells me I’m at 10.4.7. Okay, so this mystical daemon must be on the system somewhere. Dropping to a terminal window (I tend to prefer iTerm over Terminal), I broke out the trusty find command, which told me that yes, indeed, the daemon exists on my system. The only two files with “dashboardadvisoryd” in their names were:

/private/etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/dashboardadvisoryd

So, does that mean my system is not phoning home to the Apple Mothership, or does this thing only run periodically (say, from cron or launchd?) Nobody I’ve read yet has really specified how it runs. Anyone know? Or has Apple disabled this in something else I installed via Software Update? (Yes, unlikely, I know.) I suppose one final option is that Little Snitch has been asking me about it, but I’ve not been around to answer it, so it happily defaults to denying the connection. Couldn’t find anything in the system logs from Little Snitch, so I’m not sure about this last theory.

UPDATE: Yes, I had Little Snitch set to automatically deny any connection request after 60 seconds. I’ve disabled this for now to see if I can catch this little daemon in the act.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Apple, Security, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.