Il est souvent reproché à Microsoft de tenter d'espionner ses clients, notamment avec le futur système de protection intégré à son OS. Mais voilà Apple sur le banc des accusés : Mac OS X 10.4.7, au lancement de Dashboard, contacte Apple avec le « Widget Advisory » pour déterminer si vos Widgets nécessitent une mise à jour. Ce qui le cas échéant est proposé à l’utilisateur. Le problème c’est que, contrairement à la fonction « mise à jour logiciels », celle-ci est invisible. Heureusement pour ceux qui aiment savoir ce que leur ordinateur fait, il existe un moyen de la désactiver via le Terminal.

How To Disable Apple's "Dashboard Advisor"

Topic: Corporate Spyware

Oh, Apple.

How could you? With the recently released maintence update Mac OS 10.4.7, the company has added a background daemon that reports information about your computer to Apple once every eight hours.

Called the Widget Advisory, the invisible program checks which widgets you have at activation, as well as their version information, and submits the info to Apple, which checks to see if they're all up-to-date. If not, you get a prompt to update your software.

It would be fine if Apple released a widget that would allow users to voluntarily submit such information (that's basically what the system-wide Software Update program does), but making it automatic and seamless means most users don't know how to turn it off. It feels like the work of Microsoft.

However, the program can be disabled with a little work on the OS X Terminal.

Launch a window and enter:

sudo mv /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist
 /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist.disabled

And then reboot. It's out of your hair. Not that it ever should have been there.

(Thanks, Andrew and Red Sweater Blog!) Source : The Cult of Mac Blog