What does this mean!?

[G99]

SyndicationAgent[465] WARNING: NSURLConnection for CNET News.com RSSFeed never completed; canceling it

At this time, I think I was just surfing around in Safari. This is kinda weird as I have never visited CNET, and rarely use RSS. Don't have any widgets that gather this kind of info either. When looking for the process in Activity Monitor about five minutes later, I couldn't find it. Does anyone know what the SyndicationAgent is? I'm a little scared as, at the moment it seems someone is trying to open up a connection with me (?), but I may be completely wrong, as I'm a dummy when it comes to interpreting these logs.
Thank you in advance for any answers.

 

[mkrishnan]

Here's my guess:

Safari has a number of bookmarks that are created by default when you first start it, right? Including a bookmark folder full of RSS feeds. If you have an RSS bookmark for news.com, it will periodically update the bookmark so it can tell you how many news articles are available in the feed. That's pretty much what RSS does. If you don't like it, delete all the bookmarks in Safari that were created by Apple....

 

[G99]

I do have a CNET bookmark. But, I'm worried about the "warning" part of the log. Do you know what could have happened?

 

[mkrishnan]

Most likely a network timeout or a server glitch or something minor like that. The warning is just a "note" that this happened. If this is a notebook computer, it might have tried to update while it didn't have an internet connection. It's nothing really to worry about.

Two things to clarify....

1) I wasn't clear about this earlier... the bookmark causes YOUR computer to contact the server at news.com -- not the other way around. This has nothing to do with any sort of attempt by an external computer to open a connection with yours. Yours is trying to open a connection with the external computer to get the data. It just happened to fail to get the data. The thing that protects you from externally initiated connections is the firewall. You should turn on the firewall in OS X (System Preferences -> Sharing -> Firewall -> click the START button).

2) In these sorts of logs, WARNING and ERROR mean two very specific things that are sort of nerdy computerese... An error tells you that a core part of a program didn't work the way it was supposed to. What I mean by core is that the rest of the process the program is trying to complete depends on that step. When an error occurs, the result is something like... a crash (program or system), a program forcing itself to terminate, or a corrupted or nonsensical or empty output file. A *warning* is more like a "for your information" -- it means that the failure was not critical to any sort of mission being carried out. Sometimes, a long string of warnings is indicative of a significant problem. But usually, a single warning means that a program tried to do something, got a result it didn't expect, and wanted to notify you, but is able to carry on with its life without too much concern.

So in general, warnings in logs are something you can mostly ignore....

 

[G99]

Thanks for your informative reply. The information you gave me will save me from much stress in the future I should be far less worried about these kind of minor things. Anyway, today no errors got logged, so I am