Hacker News Reader

Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'll confess that this is a real deal breaker for me personally .. I'll be having a closer look at ports and maybe fink soon. Maybe after all its time to get off OSX and back to Linux, where these sorts of things happen less frequently ..

View on HN

If it means that much to you, why not add host file entries to point GA's DNS records at 0.0.0.0 or something else invalid? If you don't trust that either, supplement it with packet filter rules to drop traffic heading to the IP addresses to which those names (currently) resolve. Switching platforms seems like a major overreaction here.

Privacy should be the default.

Only if you're willing to pay for it. Otherwise, you trade privacy for convenience, or some other benefit.

Its, of course, always your choice if you're willing to trade it for something.

There is a lot of free, open and convenient software that respects my privacy.

Do you think money or privacy violations must be part of the equation to make good software?

That is like the old argument against free/open software that I heard from a lot of people, back in the 90's. I thought we were past that.

Its a huge hassle, and I don't want to have to keep fighting the battle against this policy. So I'll just rather switch.

Maybe try out Nix while you're at it, too! I'm using NixOS, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. The standalone package manager fills the same niche as Homebrew, I think.

I only use Linux, so what do I know, but... is the highly interesting Nix package manager a full alternative to Homebrew ?

Or you could just say HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 and be done with it.

Until next month when we might need to set HOMEBREW_NO_PIWIK=1337...

I'd assume "NO_ANALYTICS" would mean "no analytics" not "no google analytics?

I'd assume that software that wasn't sending analytics wouldn't start doing so without at least informing me first, but I'd be wrong. I think the parents point is that we can't trust Homebrew to do the right thing, because they've now chosen not to.

Who knows!? This marks quite a change in attitude where the end user is suddenly responsible for staying on top of newly silently introduced opt-out settings. I'm pretty disappointed and feel the amount of trust I've had in the maintainers have dropped considerably. Sneakily sending random HTTP requests to third party analytics services and stuffing my dotfiles with unique identifiers for tracking purposes is not what I expected from a friendly open source project.

This could have been handled much better with some sort of opt-in prompt like the debian installer does for its popcon usage tracker.

>This marks quite a change in attitude where the end user is suddenly responsible for staying on top of newly silently introduced opt-out settings. I'm pretty disappointed and feel the amount of trust I've had in the maintainers have dropped considerably.

I agree with you. I'd much rather have this be out in the open - like, ever 5th time I run 'brew' or something, it asks me for permission to send analytics, and the options are "YES-once, YES-Always, NO-NEVER", and if I say NO, NEVER, it never asks me again.

If spying on me can be automated, so can not spying on me.

Yep, and as you can see if you read the code there are as few references to GA as possible so that it’d be easy to change the service we use without editing code everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com