"PubSubAgent" is driving me nuts.

I don't use any RSS feeds, the updating of which is one of the main tasks of PubSubAgent, so I just have this rule completely disabled in Little Snitch.

So this is interesting. I just opened Safari, which I never use, and despite the fact that I have RSS feeds disabled in Preferences there, PubSubAgent wanted to connect to some Google thing.

I never see this from Firefox, which is my usual browser.

Since I never use Safari, I don't really care about this behavior. But you might want to select some completely useless, for RSS that is, application as the default RSS reader.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

I suppose one possibiity, if a bit drastic, would be to disable PubSubAgent.app by first zipping it (compressing) it, then trashing the app, which is located here. That way, the app itself can be restored if it's ever needed in the future by unzipping it. But left zipped it will be dead in the water and shouldn't ever bother you again.

/System/Library/Frameworks/PubSub.framework/Versions/A/Resources/PubSubAgent.app

OK, I just tried that and it put the zipped copy on the Desktop with my user as the owner. So that wouldn't be right. What you could do is trash the app, keep a zipped copy and if you ever need it back you could return it to its proper location, unzip it, and then run Permissions repair, which should restore the correct Permissions.

Other than that, there is probably some way to zip it, while keeping the proper Permissions and leaving it in place, from the command line. But I don't know how.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

Of course, your own suggestion to just have Little Snitch deny connections from PSA would be fine.

EDIT: well, that didn't work. I had to set up a separate rule to permanently deny connections to the ****** Google news thing.

I really have no idea why or what PSA wants to connect to. My original rule wasn't firm enough, but this one seems to nuke it. I threw in Deny globally for all users, but I'm sure it's not necessary--unless you have other users.

This was the original one, which I never bothered with before, because, as I said, I don't use Safari. I didn't actually deny anything, just unchecked it, while keeping Allow, which was useless.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

More confusion: Then again, maybe you don't want to nuke PSA, if that's the way it gets the Google Safe Browsing update?

This sounds both too idiotically simple and too good to be true, but try trashing in your User/Library/PubSub/Feeds. Just select all the Feeds and trash them, not the enclosing Folder. I'm prepared to hear otherwise, but who knows, this might be it.

Perhaps you updated Little Snitch and since RSS feeds were removed from Mountain Lion, it is now alerting you, even though you are on 10.6. Run Terminal.app and use the "pubsub" command to delete these subscriptions.

What you've done may be sufficient, but the Terminal utility pubsub is really dead simple to use.

First, enter pubsub list This will give you a list of all your subscriptions. Find the offending URL there, copy it, hit return to close that window. (Or just use Shell>New Window) Open Terminal again and enter

pubsub unsubscribe >name of the offending URL as it is written in pubsub list<

and hit return.

I must warn you, though, that I tried this for news.google.com, which Little Snitch keeps telling me PSA wants to connect to, and it was useless. I've unsubscribed and PSA still insists on connecting.

But, who knows, give it a try. It may work for you. Let me know if what you've done is working for you now.

Scroll in Terminal using the up/down arrows. The mouse is useless. Use the delete key to backspace.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

Noticed the same thing - LittleSnitch reporting connections from PubSubAgent.

The URLs turned out to be entries in Safari's Top sites (the thumbnail in the browser's home page), and the connections were Safari trying to update them. Edited the list of top sites in the browser these entries from the pubsub subscriptions.

You can use the following to unsubsribe from all of them:

pubsub list | grep 'http://' | cut -f3 | xargs -L 1 pubsub unsubscribe