[kisielk]

I'm living in Malawi for a couple of a months and I totally agree the cloud features and automatic software updates on my computer have become a huge nuisance. Often the internet connection is slow (even on Skyband EVDO) and automatic updaters or cloud sync can easily suck up all my bandwidth.

Sometimes I find my internet totally sucking only to find out there's some app like iCloud photo sync trying to download some photos from one of my contact's streams. Or at one point Mac OS decided to download a sizeable XCode update in the background.

These features are a big convenience back in Canada, but really frustrating when travelling and using slow connections. I really wish there was one setting somewhere to turn off all background syncing and downloading.

So far the best solution I've found is to install Little Snitch and just manually approve connections.