[mythtv-users] What are these connections?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2017 11:17:07 +1100, you wrote:

>On 09/11/17 00:44, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Nov 2017 22:19:23 +1100, you wrote:
>
>[trimmed discussion on mythtv contacting alcor.mythtv.org twice daily]
>
>> I expect that the main reason for doing it this way is so that you can
>> see the visual styles of all the themes when you are selecting one. If
>> the themes were in packages, you would need to hunt down all the theme
>> packages and probably install them before you could find out how they
>> look.  That would not work well and most people would never bother to
>> change from the default theme, and would be missing out on using a
>> theme that suits them better.
>
>I am not clear here. Would it not be as simple as fetching the themes
>in the post-install script of the package during an update? Nothing
>should change between updates, but if I really want to refresh my
>themes then I should be able to do so when I use the chooser.
>
>Personally, I do not see how selecting a theme is such a high frequency
>activity that justifies a twice daily refresh.
>
>cheers

Not being the author of this, I do not know the logic behind how it
works, but my guess would be that it just checks for any changes
rather than downloading anything - a very quick transaction with very
few bytes involved.  If it detects a change, only then would it
download the new theme metadata file.  I think it may be modeled on
how apt works to check for new packages.  That checks daily for
changes, and automatically downloads the new package list files if
they have changed.  I am not sure why the themes check would be twice
daily instead of only once daily though.

Have you ever checked your Internet traffic to see what is actually
going on?  There are all sorts of software that does this sort of
checking, especially on Windows where there is no package manager.
MythTV runs on systems that do not use packaging as well as more
normally on ones that do, so putting the check into the packaging is
not really an option.  And there are plenty of people who run MythTV
from compiled source, especially those testing the development
version.

Unless you are paranoid about your IP address being logged by a site,
this sort of checking is simply not a problem.  If you are that
paranoid, then you need to be connecting via an anonymising VPN at all
times, and changing the IP address used by the VPN regularly.