I just saw this little script to stop the Dashboard Advisory feature in OSX 10.4.7, and thought I would share. If don’t know why someone would would want to do this, it’s because Apple decided to put in a little program to see if your widgets are up to date and automatically update them for you if needed. I personally like this feature as I usually have 25 open at once and it takes too long to do manually. Of course, many people feel this is an invasion of their privacy, so if you feel Apple is spying on you, read on.
First of all, make sure you know what you are doing with the Terminal or you could screw up your OS pretty badly. If you are fearless (but fearful of someone finding out what goods you have) then type the following command in Terminal.
sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch.plist /System/Library/
TAAAA-DAAAAA!!!! No more ‘spyware’ on your mac. You may now go about your questionable downloading with a false sense of security. Enjoy!
A MUCH easier and safer way (no Terminal needed) is to use LittleSnitch and just forbid the misleadingly innocently named Dashboard Advisory from every calling anyone again.
Just for your information, it is often phoning someone even when you aren’t using Widgets. That is easily verified with LittleSnitch, and is extremely suspicious.
We LOVE Little Snitch and have it on all of our computers. It is a staple software program of OSX in our opinion. It is a simple solution to any software that is trying to “phone home”.