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Apple Phone Home [Upd]

By Kalomir. Original by Lionel - 29/07/2003 22:40:53 CEST - Category: Mac OS X
Dylan has made some disturbing discoveries.

I just installed Mac OS X on my iPod, but as I didn't wish to reboot from the CD for such a small task, I've merely been to the "System" folder that's on the CD, then Installation/Packages, and opened OSInstall.mpkg
Install process went smoothly (in fact it's not even finished while I'm typing those lines), but at tyhe beginning, during "pre-treatment script" excecution, Little Snitch warned me that "Perl"was attempting to connect to apple.com. A bit puzzled, I let him go on but then checked, in OSInstall.mpkg/Contents/Resources, the contents of the "preinstall" file that's normally proceeded with before the install self : it contained the line "LOG=$1/Contents/Resources/log".
This drove me to check also Contents/Resources/log, whose contents was quite more surprising!

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Installation Log Client
# Mike Trent
# 11/3/2000
#
# we need to send:
#   the update name            "update"
#   the ip number            "address"
#   the ether MAC address      "ether"
#   the install start time      "start"
#   the install stop time      "stop"
use FileHandle;
use Socket;
$gHost = "sw-eng.apple.com";
$gHost = "17.203.18.80"; # sw-eng
$gPort = 3001;
&main();
exit 0;

Followed by a code (Perl, so readable) to interprete the results.
(You'll find it on your install CD in folder /System/Installation/Packages/OSinstall.mpkg/Contents/Resources/log)
Could anyone tell me why Apple sends, prior to install and without warning us, both IP and MAC adresses, as well as OSX install hour?!!

Our advice before we know more on that stuff is to deconnect from the Net before proceeding to any installation.
[Upd] After some raw discussions on our forums, that line of code turns out to be no more than old thing perhaps belonging to a beta version. IPs seem not to function on the Web. Nothing gets out of your machine.
We still consider though that unplugging a net wire (especially if that net is always connected to the Web) is a bit of tranquillity.
After the OS is installed, applications exist that enable control of what goes out of the machine.
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