www.usa.gov hosting Apple Software?

[jprokos]

I really like Little Snitch. The new version especially. It lets you know what your computer is connected to.

I am downloading Apple Mountain Lion from the AppStore and I noticed that the server it's downloading from is www.usa.gov. That is "The U.S. Government's Official Web Portal. Can anyone explain to me why Apple's software is being hosted by the U.S. Government?

Just curious.

John

[agentx]

It is the Akamai CDN ( Content Delivery Network) so lots of clever DNS stuff going on i think.

[hayne]

More important than the original question is that this serves as an object lesson in how to read domain names.
Domain names are hierarchical, starting with a top-level domain (e.g. ".com", ".net" etc) which is at the right-hand side (the end) of the domain name. The second-last from the right usually indicates the domain owner.
In this case, it is "akamai".

The "www.usa.gov" is at the beginning (far left). This signifies nothing other than that the domain owner (Akamai) has chosen to name their sub-domains that way.

This stuff is important since scammers often take advantage of the fact that people tend to just look at the left-had side (the beginning) of a domain name when checking if it is legitimate. So they might send you an email with links that start with "www.apple.com" but which are actually just sub-domains of some domain that the scammer owns.

[benwiggy]

This is also an object lesson in how Little Snitch, and programs like it, often do little more than give cause for worry and waste time investigating perfectly ordinary activities.

On another Mac forum I frequent, there are many people who spend their days obsessing with network connections, as well as RAM Usage and paging that Activity Monitor shows; and CPU temp and fan speeds revealed by other utilities -- in the absence of any observable problem with their machine.

Nearly every app I own checks home for updates. Some ask if they can send anonymised data about usage or crashes. Some even check in with a server as part of authorisation. Is anyone checking up on ME, in any way other than as one anonymous data point in a sea of information? No.
LS may have some merit as protection against malware, but in that regard it's even more annoying and pervasive than actual AV software.

[roncross@cox.net]

Quote: Originally Posted by benwiggy This is also an object lesson in how Little Snitch, and programs like it, often do little more than give cause for worry and waste time investigating perfectly ordinary activities.

This is really a good point. So much of what's reported by these software is just common cause occurrence. What a really good software would do is to have the ability to separate out common cause vs. special cause. It's a waste of time to be bother with stuff that is supposed to happen when you interact with the web.

Not to mention, chasing down common cause occurrence is a huge waste of productivity.