Beware of Google

[robedal]

I noticed that some log files (system.log, daily.out in /private.var.) were unsensibly large, The trouble was traced to a stealth program installed by google which was supposed to check for updates. It was (unsuccessfully) "phoning home" every 10 secs! producing lots of error messages. It took quite a bit of work removing files and working with launchctl to get my machine "google free". Things seem much better now.

[Dan Millar]

Hey Robedal!

Thanks for the heads up, but more info would be very helpful for the rest of us.

What do you mean when you say "installed by google", have you installed Chrome or some of their web apps or ... what? What is the name of the program and where is it located? How do you know it was "phoning home every ten seconds"?

Also, would be helpful to know which version of the OS you are using...

Thanks, and...

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[robedal]

Right. I didn't want to get into too many details, as it is a bit geeky. (i'm running 10.6 .8)

The problem seems to be an automatic software update program stealthily installed by google software (e.g. Chrome, Picasa,   ) (Apparently buried in the EULA agreement is a notification), In my case the software update was invoked erroneously, failed and tried again every 10 seconds, filling up log files with junk.  I'm not the only one who has hit this.

If you "google" (that seems to be safe :-)) ) "remove google software" there are discussion, suggestions, ....
At

              1)  http://www.twentyways.com/2009/02/07/permanently-disable-google-software-update-on-os-x/

someone called hank posted

     hank s
     Written on Sun, May 8, 2011 at 10:36am · Link
     hmmm, this just started showing up on launch on my Mac:

     5/8/11 8:28:57 AM   com.apple.launchd[1] (com.google.keystone.daemon[4445]) bootstrap_register() erroneously called instead of bootstrap_check_in(). Mach service: com.google.Keystone.Daemon

     5/8/11 8:29:20 AM   com.apple.launchd[1]   (com.google.keystone.daemon) Throttling respawn: Will start in 8 seconds

     5/8/11 8:31:51 AM   com.apple.launchd[1] (com.google.keystone.daemon[4581]) Exited with exit code: 1

... lather, rinse, repeat .... been doing it for an hour now.

This is (essentially) what was happening on my machine.  In some log files I found pages of the following

Sun Aug 14 00:00:35 Dale-A-Robertson-s-Computer com.apple.launchd[1] (com.google.keystone.daemon[57511]) <Warning>: Exited with exit code: 1
Sun Aug 14 00:00:35 Dale-A-Robertson-s-Computer com.apple.launchd[1] (com.google.keystone.daemon) <Warning>: Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Some log files in particular 'system.out' and 'daily.out' were getting ridiculously big. To check
one needs to use the terminal, and do
     cd /private/var/log
     ls -l system.log *.out
yielding

-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  35508220 20 Aug 03:55 daily.out
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel      1728 17 Aug 11:51 monthly.out
-rw-r-----  1 root  admin     13180 20 Aug 10:14 system.log

-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel       797 20 Aug 03:55 weekly.out

In my case the log from the daily maintenance script has gotten overly big (355082220 blocks).
(You may need to 'sudo' various commands.)

see also
     2) http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=27117d0828181bf3&hl=en
     3) http://raamdev.com/howto-remove-google-software-update-on-mac-os-x
     4) http://wireload.net/products/guu-google-update-uninstaller/
     5) http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=27117d0828181bf3&hl=en
It's not MAC only - see
      6) http://www.techsoar.com/stop-google-update-software/

The thing has more lives than a truckload of cats, and it wasn't easy to exterminate. I more or less followed "by hand" the recipes given at
      7) http://wireload.net/products/guu-google-update-uninstaller/
and used launchctl
     man launchctl
to get rid of the automatic launch. As you can see it's not exactly trivial so be careful (I recommend having a fresh bootable backup around.)
Somehow after every daily maintenance script the content of 'daily.out'  contains all the old garbage. There doesn't seem to be any problem with deleting it.
    sudo rm -f daily.out
    Password: .......
    ls daily.out
    ls: daily.out: No such file or directory

There are still some things in the logs that I'm not happy with, but seem unrelated.
Cheers.