[Pythonmac-SIG] Python solution to monitor your internet connection?

[W.T. Bridgman]

I know of a few commercial/shareware packages that can monitor your 
machine for apps that try to 'phone home' when you're online, but does 
anyone know of any open source (preferably Python) solutions for this?

If not, can anyone point me to somewhere that I might find out what I 
need to write such an app that can monitor my internet connection?  I'm 
specifically interested in monitoring OS X applications.  Do the python 
internet modules have sufficient access to the internet API to do this?

Thanks,
Tom