Why would Airport base station agent connect to openchannel.nbcnews.com?

[misswormwood]

Like many of us I became aware of this OS X background process (and its regular attempts to phone home) through Lil Snitch.

I normally allow it to connect to the update server at apsu.apple.com although I always found it a bit strange that this utility uses its own software update channel.

But when I recently checked Lil Snitch´s network monitor I found that the base station agent connected to servers called openchannel.nbcnews.com and vineblogs.msnbc.msn.com.edgesuite.net which I think is very odd.

Does anybody care to comment? Does anybody have information explaining this behavior of the base station agent?

 

[DarkoDonnie]

I would assume you have a news widget/feed somewhere - in one of your apps that's requesting that info? maybe it's a default'ed top-site in Safari that's grabbing a screenshot on launch? maybe a dashboard widget? maybe an advertisement in an app?

Do you recall clicking or opening anything before you saw the request to connect to nbcnews ?

 

[misswormwood]

Thanks for your reply.

I´ve no news widgets in my dashboard and msnbc isn´t a top site in Safari (which I hadn´t launched anyway) or any of my browsers. The only thing I did before was checking my webmail (at a non-commercial mail provider, not Google or anything).

I´m wondering why would an app use the airport base station agent to connect to news or ad sites? I´d expect this to be the browser (or the relevant app, for that matter) which connects to the corresponding servers but certainly not the base station agent?