Why Is Google Port Scanning Me?

I’m used to the normal ‘Internet background radiation’ of hackers/bots scanning the common ports on my router (SSH, VNC, etc.) but recently I’ve noticed scans of multiple ports from IPs registered to Google.

e.g., I'm getting a few thousand a day of these:

[INFO] Sat Aug 22 11:43:44 2009 Blocked incoming TCP packet from 66.102.7.191:80 to xxx:47414 as ACK received but there is no active connection
[INFO] Sat Aug 22 11:43:44 2009 Blocked incoming TCP packet from 66.102.7.191:80 to xxx:15370 as ACK received but there is no active connection
[INFO] Sat Aug 22 11:43:44 2009 Blocked incoming TCP packet from 66.102.7.191:80 to xxx:63879 as ACK received but there is no active connection
[INFO] Sat Aug 22 11:43:44 2009 Blocked incoming TCP packet from 66.102.7.191:80 to xxx:7748 as ACK received but there is no active connection

Looking back I see these requests have been coming for months but have increased in frequency recently.

They come from a range of IPs which whois reports are assigned to Google:

66.102.7.101

66.102.7.191

74.125.15.22

74.125.15.93

74.125.15.100

74.125.15.157

74.125.19.118

74.125.103.33

74.125.103.96

74.125.103.97

etc.

So for what purpose is Google port scanning me?

UPDATE:

These are likely just delayed responses to a web page request made by your browser just before you quit your web browser.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=66719

Unhelpful Error Messages

Trying to access BD-Live on my Blu-ray player. This is an unhelpful error message from The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) that had me wondering where the error was:



Trying with Men in Black (1997) was much more informative and though not 100% correct put me on the right track—I needed to insert a memory stick:



And after all that BD-Live was a big disappointment: the sparse amount of content which was actually avaiable could just have easily been included on the disc rather than waiting on a download—especially as the downloaded content is locked away until you re-insert the disc.

FileMaker Pro 10 and ‘tell application id’

An FYI on AppleScript and FileMaker 10:

In FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced the application id was ‘com.filemaker.pro.advanced’. In FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced it’s now ‘com.filemaker.client.advanced’.

If you remove FM9A from your system, opening scripts which contain the old address ‘tell application id "com.filemaker.pro.advanced"’ will fail with ‘Unable to read the file because the script is not editable (it was saved as run-only).’—which is misleading as it’s obviously the old dictionary they can’t find.

If you install both 9 and 10 you can open the scripts and change them from ‘com.filemaker.pro.advanced’ to ‘com.filemaker.client.advanced’ (I keep old versions of FileMaker on disc images for situations like this—they can’t be launched unintentionally but they’re available when needed).