Archive
Removing Google Software Update
Much has been written about how far Google intrudes into your online privacy. I notice this when I use my Gmail account and have small targeted advertising links at the top of the page. Occasionally they are useful links so I don’t mind the small loss of privacy. That’s all changed with the latest release of Google Earth and Picasa.
I recently mentioned Picasa for Mac as a fast photo viewer and intended to use it alongside Lightroom for browsing photo’s. Google earth has been updated to version 5 adding lots of interesting new features. Both of these apps tie in with the Google Software Updater which is a background task claiming to exist only to regularly check for software updates.
My objection here is a having a resource consuming process that is out of my control and providing a remote service with information I can’t see. Most Macintosh apps have an easily controlled update check that runs at a user configurable interval or on app startup. Even Apple’s Software Update can be turned off easily. Google give you no controll over the update app, and don’t even make it clear that the updater is being installed. Several sites including ArsTechnica and Wired have covered this story in detail so I won’t go into detail. It all comes down to Google’s attitude that ‘it’s in the EULA’ so they aren’t doing anything the user isn’t told about. And we all read EULA’s before installing software, don’t we? Read more…
10.5.3 released
The Leopard 10.5.3 update is available now in Software Update. My Macbook is currently being backed up using SuperDuper, then 10.5.3 goes on for testing. If I get time I will try applying the update to one of my hackintosh test partitions to see how that goes. Fingers crossed the networking issues are finally sorted out for everyone, and hopefully Leopard will now be the (relatively) bug free OS we wanted.
UPDATE
The Macbook update worked fine, and it’s now showing my iPod Touch and hackintosh in the Finder sidebar. Trying to update the test partition on the hackintosh crashed the install and it’s now not bootable. Looks like I’ll have to wait for the hacked version of the software updater.