I decided to look into Crossover linux seeing how they have a promotion with Linuxquestions.org going on. Mostly trying this out for the blasted shockwave plugin to a play an online jigsaw game I have missed for years while in linux.

Crossover works as promised, plugging into Firefox (I had idiotically thought I needed to install IE as well...thank goodness not true).

To get to the point, while installing some other windows apps for grins and chuckles with Crossover, up pops an Adobe/Macromedia dialog box that there is a shockwave update available, blah blah. Quite a shock to see this on a linux desktop (as with the IE icon, will be getting rid of that tonight). I did not have Firefox open. This thing had to phone home to find that out, no? I would not be surprised though if since the wine server was open for install of unrelated, perhaps something seized the opportunity? I don't know if there is any harm in it checking for updates really, but I switched to linux for control and this apparently is not under my control. It really is nice to be able to play that game again daily after years of maybe booting windows once or twice a month - but this isn't worth opening up a hole in my system.

Is there a simplified way to monitor outbound traffic? I am running iptables configured with Guarddog. But wouldn't know where to begin to look for something phoning home. Thanks for advice.