Again about those stealth UDP connections

A few days ago I embarked on a crusade to try and figure out why my home computer was being subjected to so many connection attempts, each one needing to be handled by my CPU. It still is, but now I think I figured why. The culprits are all those apps that my contacts (both colleagues and friends) keep open on their machines and require a status update every 10 minutes or so. There is nothing I can do to prevent my computer from being constantly interrupted by pings except use a firewall. From my side however I did resolve to keep my abuse of the network to a minimum by turning off all such applications and this includes Skype, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Chat. In case of Flickr I took even the more radical approach of removing all contacts I do not know personally.

In conclusion: I once worked in a virtual office, being available on all those social networking sites, now, in respect of your CPU efficiency and of the network bandwidth, you need to fix a time if you want to reach me.