I replicated the issue by running IGB network traffic through a postman proxy on port 5555:
./run_igb.sh -Dhttp.proxyHost=127.0.0.1 -Dhttp.proxyPort=5555
I then monitored packet transfer using the command line tool tcpdump and learned that:

• the ip address and port of the requested resource are 152.15.136.168:80
• this endpoint being hit both when using the run script/jar file and when using the installer/installed application
• the code responsible is in line 159 of ./main/src/main/resources/config.properties
• I am unsure what its purpose is, but removing this line resolves the issue

Please see feature branch:
https://bitbucket.org/pbadzuh/igb_pbdev/branch/IGBF-2056#diff

Please see pull request:
https://bitbucket.org/lorainelab/integrated-genome-browser/pull-requests/748/igbf-2056-remove-unneeded-rest-request/diff

To verify this is turned off, testers should check that the "early access" (master branch) installer for your platform no longer tries to access the above URL. Also please check to see if the 9.0.2 release is also attempting to access the above URL.

It may be difficult to do this – I'm not sure how to "spy on" a local application's attempts to hit URLs on the internet.

If you can figure out how to do that – either on a Mac or on Windows – that would be very useful not just for this ticket but for other things in future.

Specifically, validating a community-contributed IGB App, we would probably want to check for whether or not it is trying to communicate with a server.

Philip Badzuh please provide some notes explaining how to use tcpdump to check the installer version of IGB. When done, please move to "Needs Testing."

You can execute the line below, replacing 'en1' with the network interface you're using (can be found using ifconfig), prior to starting IGB:
sudo tcpdump -i en1 -nn host reporting.bioviz.org

If, on breaking out of the command, 0 packets are captured, then that endpoint isn't being hit

Working as expected.