Here’s interesting, buried deep inside the new beta FaceTime for Mac is code which alerts you when you receive an incoming FaceTime call — even when you haven’t got the software active on your Mac. Apple says as much on their Website:
The theory seems sound enough — it is, after all, no more than the same alerts you are already used to receiving from some non-open apps on your iOS device. Through Push Notifications…
A German Mac user dropped us a line alerting us to their findings (of which more here). It seems they were playing with FaceTime for Mac, when they noted that network activity monitor application, Little Snitch, was tracking all kinds of unrecognized activity being implemented by the application. In their own words:
“Little Snitch told me from time to time that \”apsd-ft\” wants to establish a connection with an Apple server (for example 7-courier.push.apple.com). As far as I can see, apsd-ft stands for \”Apple Push Service Daemon – FaceTime\”. So I dug a bit deeper. There are also some new launch agents in ~/Library/LaunchAgents like com.apple.apsd-ft.plist und com.apple.FTMonitor.plist.”
Reading between the lines, of course, this could also mean we can expect push notifications for other applications will debut within Mac OS X Lion when it ships in summer next year.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments