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My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

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Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#92

Polling domains when attached to the network like this doesnt suprise me in the least. Apple's ecosystem has often been praised for its tight integration, and this consistent network connectivity is the result. Anybody who has worked with large scale services that rely on messaging services to ensure people get timely notifications and data, knows that you need services which are continuously polling endpoints to che…

> Polling domains when attached to the network Apple devices do communicate over BT even when you explicitly turn it off and put your device in flight mode.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#93

I use a slow cellular connection and noticed some apple service (I could never figure out which one, even after installing an outgoing firewall) was aggressively uploading some large blob every time the mac woke from sleep, which made the whole connection useless for up to half an hour. At some point, apple must've fixed this "bug", but the experience -- and apple's increasingly obtrusive software -- convinced me to…

Lack of transparency is almost a feature for these systems, and definitely something that serves the vendor, not the user. My daily driver is a Linux for the same reason - there is just so much less bullshit going on, and if I want to find something out, I can.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#94
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried GNU/Linux?

If you built up a Linux system to have similar functionality (single user account across systems that syncs user data, automatically backs up to a cloud, syncs photos and videos, sends all traffic through an anonymizing relay, receives push notifications for essentially all apps, etc), would it contact fewer services?

To some extent. You could do a lot of the syncing with a decentralized system like syncthing. You could use GPS for time.

Tor for anonymization and additional firewall-punching.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#95
post #79
post #42

For fun, compare and contrast the comments here to this post on Windows 10 from 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208050

This article: Apple’s OS relies on a lot of services to deliver its features! That article: Microsoft reports every click you make Is that the comparison you’re making?

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Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Microsoft has telemetry: * Windows is a spyware machine - how can anyone use it? Year of Linux baby! When Apple has telemetry: * It's working as expected. So... to be fair, is there a thorough comparison of the two? How are they the same, and how are they different?

The people who complain about windows telemetry, arnt going to Mac, they use Arch Linux btw.

Are you sure Mac users (or at least fans) don't also call or consider Windows telemetry "spyware"? I suspect they hold that opinion too.

But yes, Year of the Linux Desktop, baby!

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#97
post #80
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article’s author would apparently be happier if everything were on a single domain with just ports or paths to separate services. Thinking about the number of DNS names seems kind of silly.

This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the article. The number was just intended to illustrate the amount of communication that occurs.

The amount of communications would be better illustrated by the number of connections made in a period of time, maybe complemented with the amount of data transferred up/down. Making a 1000 connections towards one domain name with different URLs does not fundamentally differ from making 1000 connections each towards a separate domain name (which names can be the same server, just with a bunch of IPs).

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#98

While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait…

Look into the app Little Snitch. It's fantastic! https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

I'm unaffiliated with the owners.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#99

While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait…

Look into the app Little Snitch. It's fantastic! https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html I'm unaffiliated with the owners.

Second Little Snitch.

> NOTE: Corporate IT departments no likee Little Snitch.

Re: My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use

#100
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t see the person you’re replying to ever mention Microsoft. It seems weird to accuse them of hypocrisy?

This is a very valid criticism of my post and many that group "opinions" as if they come from a single source. Here, the top-voted comment is OK with Apple software phoning home, but there's no evidence they are not equally OK with Microsoft software phoning home, so I'm contrasting this popular opinion with another popular opinion elsewhere. Here's one example from a different user, where Microsoft is described as "…

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