The CloudPull News Alert system is a feature of the Mac App Store Edition of CloudPull. If this feature is enabled, CloudPull will check an RSS feed every 24 hours. This RSS feed is dedicated to this alert system; it is separate from the RSS feed for the company blog.
The Standard Edition of CloudPull, which can be downloaded directly from goldenhillsoftware.com, has an in-app software update system. This makes the news alert system unnecessary in the Standard Edition. However, the Mac App Store Edition does not have an in-app software update mechanism.
Opt-In
CloudPull will never make a request to a Golden Hill Software web server without your permission. In the Mac App Store Edition of CloudPull, the setup wizard asks for permission to check for news alerts. This is checked by default.
If you switch from a version of CloudPull that does not support news alerts (either the Standard Edition or a version that predates this feature), CloudPull will ask whether you want to enable news alerts with a dialog box.
You can enable or disable news alerts at any time from the Preferences window.
Only Pertinent Messages
CloudPull News Alerts will only be used to broadcast messages that pertain to the daily use of CloudPull. This mechanism will never be used to advertise other products or services. These alerts will be used very sparingly.
Privacy
Golden Hill Software takes customer privacy very seriously. CloudPull news alert requests do not contain personal information, do not send cookies, and do not accept cookies. These requests do contain the version number of CloudPull and the version number of Mac OS X as the "User-Agent" header. This is the entire text of a typical news alert request:
GET /news/cloudpull/ HTTP/1.1
Host: secure.goldenhillsoftware.com
User-Agent: CloudPull/1.5.1 (Mac OS X 10.7.0)
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: keep-alive
Security
CloudPull uses HTTPS for news alerts, in order to validate that alerts originate from the Golden Hill Software web server.
Fault Tolerance
If for any reason CloudPull is unable to retrieve or parse the RSS feed, CloudPull will try again an hour later. An inability to retrieve or parse the RSS feed will not interfere with the normal operation of CloudPull.