No, I'm concluding either malice or incompetence-to-the point-of-being-indistinguishable-from-malice, based on the premise that login (to the local computer, when the end user has not explicitly configured it to) involves any network interaction at all. It might not be true that OSX login involves network IO (as I more or less admitted above, I haven't checked), but that was not a assumption I jumped to.