Aperture outbound connections... spying?

Question

Level 1

11 points

Aperture outbound connections... spying?

Hello,
I've noticed Aperture constantly contacting outside servers. One that came to my attention was www.nhl.com.edgesuite.net. The only thing NHL related material in my libraries I have is from the game I went to last year. My question is:
Is Aperture analyzing our images and sending identified parts of the pic to copyright owners?

Posted on Mar 14, 2010 6:58 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 14, 2010 7:32 PM in response to chopperp1

LOL, no.

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Answer 2

DJFriar

Level 1

95 points

Mar 14, 2010 9:52 PM in response to chopperp1

Its not a tracking thing per se, but that URL is owned by Akamai, which is who Apple (and countless other companies) use for content delivery.

My guess (and its only a guess) is that it may be used for bug tracking or usage statistics, but I would bet money its not a "tracking" thing as you are concerned about. It could be from a plugin too, if you have any loaded.

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Answer 3

Mar 14, 2010 10:10 PM in response to DJFriar

EdgeSuite seems to be a product owned/provided by Akamai who you may or may not have heard of.

See their DNS registration info here:
http://whois.domaintools.com/edgesuite.net

More info about Akamai here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies

The basic gist is that Akamai are used to distribute content (data/sites/web pages) on a large scale, so many really large websites will use Akamai's many servers around the world to act as a kind of proxy so that instead of having one server attempting to serve many millions of people, you can have a lot of servers all over the world serving people close by (which also saves money in international bandwidth costs).

Some not very official/complete, but some info about what EdgeSuite is specifically here:
http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/PROD/1086005426_382.html
http://forums.digitaltrends.com/showthread.php?t=15938

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Answer 4

chopperp1 Author

Level 1

11 points

Mar 15, 2010 8:40 AM in response to chopperp1

Thanks for replies...
I've been aware of akamai services, and I know how they are used by bigger companies. You can also use FQDN to id the type of content that's being queried. In my case information was sent to NHL's (National Hockey League) akamai cluster, and that means the content NHL paid for to akamai. Other companies can't use FQDN that is reserved to one company, and upload/download their own data. The big question is what NHL has to do with Aperture? I don't have any plugins, or GPS info that matches any hockey arena. The only thing might be pics from the game that have many NHL logos on them. I wouldn't be surprised, if apple sneaked such functionality to provide another tool to help estimate brands popularity, or to use it by government agencies... for example identify child ***********...
I will definitely sniff some data packets, and investigate...

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Answer 5

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,380 points

Mar 15, 2010 9:49 AM in response to chopperp1

I wouldn't be surprised, if apple sneaked such functionality to provide another tool to help estimate brands popularity, or to use it by government agencies... for example identify child *********...

Given the inevitable litigation that would ensue, I would very, very surprised if Apple "sneaked such functionality" into Aperture.

Regards

TD

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