Folks:

I added Little Snitch to my Mac today to prevent outgoing keylogging (not sure I've got one but...). In any case, I was soon presented with a request tha Boinc be allowed to access help.youtube.com ! What's going on?!

I am running "rosetta@home", "Einstein@Home" and "SETI@home" so it's not clear which one is the culprit. I can easily get more information by process of elimination but wanted to know if anyone can explain this strange behavior?

Thank you.

Doug

BOINC doing that? What client version, what source of client?

Went to help.youtube.com and it says that it's coupled to a Google account... does that ring a bell?

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I personally do not hear any rings ;-) At least the other way around.

We know "Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site [---] Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down." and THE reference site is http://www.google.com/. But I'm not getting an idea why accessing its main page should cause a contact to http://help.youtube.com. At least my "...\BOINC\lookup_website.html" does not contain any note of it - maybe Doug's will... Doug, could you please take a look?

Peter

it would also be nice if we could get a look at the actual message. Does Little Snitch keep logs? If so, can you find where it said it and post with what it said word for word?

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An answer back from one of the developers:

Rom Walton wrote:

By default applications resolve a given network name to an IP address using DNS servers. For instance the computer name in a URL means nothing to the network, the web browser has to convert it to an IP address before an actual HTTP request can be made. Both www.google.com and help.youtube.com resolve to the same IP address (74.125.77.147). The system that handles conversion of IP address to a name is called RDNS (Reverse Domain Name System) and is outside of the control of BOINC.

It just so happened that when the tool you were using to monitor network traffic looked up what www.google.com resolved to the RDNS system responded back with 'help.youtube.com' instead of 'www.google.com'

Network trickery like this will start to become more common in the coming years as the available pool of IPv4 addresses are gone. I suspect Google is adjusting their network internally to be IPv6 backend processing and using IPv4/IPv6 front-end machines to handle multiple web properties.

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An answer back from one of the developers:

Rom Walton wrote:

Both www.google.com and help.youtube.com resolve to the same IP address (74.125.77.147).

Sometimes the reasons could be THAT simple...

Peter