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Forum: Site Suggestions and Help
10-07-2010, 08:19 PM
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Last few months, I've been running a utility called Little Snitch on the Macs I use. It's a great piece of work: it watches your internet connection; when ANY application receives (or sends) any packet from/to any internet address, it asks you whether you want to allow the request to proceed. (It keeps a record of your permissions, so it only asks about a given domain once.)
It's truly astounding how many sites request URLs from totally unrelated sites, particularly Google. Little Snitch is a stroke of genius, if only because you can turn off almost all ads of ANY KIND, not merely the images. You can also turn off those obnoxious Google maps that so many websites want to call up, which take MINUTES to load over an analog connection! You can also refuse to let Google download the most-recent version of GoogleTools, which is a multi-megabyte affair.
It's also surprising how many applications other than your web browser and your email program end up setting up sockets to send or receive info. For example, besides my web browsers, there's always a DNS responder (presumably does nothing but call up my internet provider to resolve domain names.) There's also something that calls up Apple from time to time, and tells Apple my "settings", whatever that means. And of course there's Adobe, trying to call home to be sure my copy of Photoshop is legit. (It is, but I hate it that PS checks.) Little Snitch tells me right now that a grand total of 31 applications have requested a connection since I got this Macbook Pro back in May.
Anyway, the reason I mention Little Snitch now, is that sometimes "PentaxForums.com" shows up on the list of running applications with a socket. That's unusual, but the extremely weird part is, this can happen even when I have not navigated to the Pentax Forums site since I launched my web browser! In the browser, there is NO clue whatsoever that this is going on -- no spinning beach ball, no indication that any resources are loading into the browser. (They're not.)
I tend to think that this behavior (a stand-alone app specifically for PentaxForums.com) is unique among all the websites I visit, but to be honest, I have not checked Little Snitch all that often, and I don't really get around to all that many websites anyway (other than ones that I have designed myself. ;)
So my question for you, Adam, is: can you think of any code of any sort that might stay running and requesting packets, apparently independent of the web browser application itself? Is it some kind of stand-alone Java? Is it something to do with Push technology? (I have Adobe Flash disabled, so it's not that.) Or is it a separate thread (CPU thread, not a forum "thread") set up by the browser specifically for the PentaxForums site (i.e. even when no PentaxForums tab is open?)
If you can think of what it might be, is there any way to turn it off?
Your expert opinion would be welcome.
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