Dashboard Phones Home
As you may have no doubt read already, Apple's latest OS X update, 10.4.7, includes a new "feature" in which Dashboard phones home to Apple's servers (supposedly) in order to make sure that the local copy of widgets matches the copy on Apple's servers. The two URLs the new daemon, named dashboardadvisoryd, connects to are:
http://www.apple.com/widgets/widgetadvisory and http://www.apple.com/widgets/parser.info.
Much to the delight of security freaks and the chagrin of Mac haters, Wired's The Cult of Mac Blog has posted a handy one line command that will disable the program. Just launch Terminal and type:
sudo mv /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist.disabledHit "return", type in your password, reboot and you're all set.
Technorati Tags: Dashboard, Apple, OS X, Mac OS X, widgets, terminal, security