The bigger question -- what other desktop apps have similar, latent daemons hanging around? I'm always wary of installing stuff like this (e.g. zoom, go2meeting, teamviewer).
Anyone know of other sneaky apps to avoid?
Anyone know of other sneaky apps to avoid?
To do that you need IPC, and a JSON endpoint is the most popular form of RPC. If the server listens on localhost, I don’t see any issue with it - any issue you would have with IPC, you would have with this style of of RPC.
Now they could have provided a library to communicate directly with the keyboard - but I think the drawback was games developers didn’t want to integrate it into their games.
They could have also opened a named pipe. Much cleaner, faster, less overhead than a web server, and way more secure (last time I checked, a website could not simply perform a request on a named pipe via JavaScript. With a local web server however...).
This is the real problem behind all of these cases of "why the heck is tool/driver/app/whatever X running a web server locally?" - the market is full of developers only knowing HTTP, and when someone just has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
There is a real shortage of devs who know about all the other IPC techniques supported by modern OSes (of which practically all of them are much faster, lower latency, less overhead-y, more secure and come with less unintended side effects than a local web server).
Not as serious as leaving an httpd around and then letting sites to hot mic you with it -- obviously -- but on par in terms of a few select adjectives.
Wonder if the LitteSnitch list of procs had the Zoom Daemon.