What is ksurl?

I googled it but no real explanation, I simply block these sort of callbacks with Little Snitch, if something stops working, you can re-consider. Is it a cookie?

I am having the same problem. Is there a way to see what is creating folders or files? In activity monitor it shows a the user as "nobody". Just wanted to throw that in. At first it wants to connect to cache.pack.google.com then after I deleted it for the first time it tried connecting to dl.google.com. This just started happening recently and doesn't seem to be related to iPhoto in anyway since I've had iPhoto '09 for months before ksurl started to appear.

HI Randolph,

Might be some help here. http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/mac/3461517-ksurl.html






Carolyn 🙂

ksurl is like curl which is part of the Leopard OS.
I am not sure, but it seems that ksurl is tied in with google and reports back (or tries to) websites you are or have browsed, possible for ranking, possibly for user-directed ads.
I would block it. It serves no useful purpose.
If you installed any of the google add-ons, that might explain why you see it. My browsers are kept relatively pristine.

I have never seen it (ksurl) on my computers, and I use LS, but I also have an extensive set of website blocks set up in my hosts file, so I rarely get to see any of the junk that is prevalent on so many websites.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

I think I can isolate it to google gears. After I installed that it started popping up in little snitch

aeneas07 wrote:
I think I can isolate it to google gears. After I installed that it started popping up in little snitch

There is much money to be made by these privacy invasion tools. I use google as little as possible, these days.
I suggest looking into
http://ixquick.com/eng/protect_privacy.html
I have no dog in the race, but I do not like google's methods.

Randolph Novak wrote:
I have Google Earth (free) and Google Sketchup 6 installed. I don't have Google Gears installed but I bet it is installed as a part of their framework, this ksurl thing. I have had the applications installed a while ago and have the updates turned off.

I am sure someone will nail this down ... maybe someone from Google. : )

IMO, the less google, the better.

Randolph Novak wrote:
I have Google Earth (free) and Google Sketchup 6 installed. I don't have Google Gears installed but I bet it is installed as a part of their framework, this ksurl thing. I have had the applications installed a while ago and have the updates turned off.

ksurl is part of Google's automatic update checking code. It could be installed with Google Earth or Sketchup.

You can browse the code at Google's site. Read the comments starting with line 112 to get the gist of what it's doing.

charlie

Randolph Novak wrote:
Spoke to soon. Ksurl came back, so now I moved onto removing Google Earth.

As I started to remove it I found this,
Mac HD > Library > Caches > com.googleUpdateEngine.Framwork.0
with a prohibit sign on it, I guess to refrain from deleting it. There are other files/directories here as well. Look in library both system and user level for *Application support* at both levels. Google directory in the library at both levels. And finally to clean it all up the preferences at both levels. That should cover all the files for it!

*I am making it go away! Argh!*

I dislike apps that do things like this. Norton is recognized as being a leader in this area 🙂
It would be good of Google to publish this, explain its purpose and offer a script or instructions for total removal. Maybe they do. You can always google for it 🙂
Try any of the various app cleaners/removers
Apple has one
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/cleanapp.html
I just checked my caches directory and find nothing with google on it. I have an old version of google earth, so either they have added this software to the new versions, or what you have is from another google app or tool
You can delete that file in a terminal using sudo, but before doing so I would suggest that you check your backup is up to date, just in case.

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

I think this is also installed by anything using updates from Google Labs. I don't have any of the other Google stuff installed but I think mine came from MacFUSE.

ksurl lives in /private/tmp/.ksda.0

I also suspect that it is launched by /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist

There are a few suggestions on how to uninstall google's updater:
http://blog.raamdev.com/2008/12/19/howto-remove-google-software-update-on-mac-os -x
http://arthurkoziel.com/2008/07/26/the-google-software-update-agent/