renaissance poisson

glad it was useful!

as far as i can tell at this point it just does an awful lot of calling back home to see whether there are updates of any kind. i am greatly in favour of automatic security updates, because then a potential problem can be fixed without me having to have heard about it already; google can just push the fix out. which is why i wanted to whitelist them. the thing is of course that we'll never know what it might be doing if it's doing this so often, and i dislike that.

your intuition is good. :) yes, what that person describes does the same thing as the chmod i did -- changing permissions on the directory -- except through the finder. i tend to use the unix side of things because i know for sure what works there, but yes, if you don't feel as comfortable using the terminal, this is a fine way of doing it instead.

however, in the long view of things, locking google away from being able to connect is suboptimal, because then one gets no more security updates. at this point that strikes me as riskier than trusting google. i will probably write a small script that unlocks that directory once a week or even once a day. or maybe let littlesnitch give all aps access to tools.google.com, but i am ornery about it right now. why can't they just be upfront about this stuff?