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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

It makes me scared to be an iTerm2 user, frankly. Because I am an idiot, it never occurred to me that I'd have to wonder about the security implications of my choice of terminal emulator. Does it otherwise have a good reputation for security?

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I used to use it religiously but recently went back to Terminal on my last two Macs and don’t really miss anything

Just ditch it - clearly the author has no regard for privacy.

I cringe just thinking about implementing something like that.

iTerm2 is great and George is absolutely responsive with any issue I've ever brought up. I am personally going to give him the benefit of the doubt here, I'm sure he'll fix things ASAP.

Yep was already fixed: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/dnslookupissue

I don't think it's worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But this should at a minimum be an opt-in feature, and not opt-out. Better yet, it's probably not needed. I've almost never needed to interact with URLs in a clickable way via a terminal.

Clickable URLs are very convenient. I have plenty of code that runs on remote machines and generates data that I'd like to view in my browser. Print the URL out, and I can click on it to open it up.

n.b. for me, in iTerm2, I have to press cmd to make the links highlight before I can click on them - so there's little danger of accidentally opening something you didn't want to.

Doing any DNS before clicking on the links seems like overkill, though. My browser can tell me if the URL is garbage or not.

I do but I always know if they are valid before I click on them, so I don't see the appeal of the DNS lookup. Plus that must be freaking slow.

Not necessarily slow, DNS Lookups are generally pretty fast:

    ~  dig somerandomurlimadeup.com | grep 'Query time: '
    ;; Query time: 23 msec

Er, that's just saying "you got lucky and the root nameserver you hit was fast". Looking up any valid .com requires that plus a 2nd level lookup.

I tried on several domain names (that I had not, to my knowledge, recently visited), and they were all around the 25ms mark.

I'm not saying that this is the case universally, but for many the typical lookup time will be very fast.

oh wow, what would that make it, 50ms? that's almost enough time to blink!

Compare to the rest of the operations your terminal do, it's crazy slow though.

The author has fixed it, and clearly this has been an educational experience. Considering the professionalness of the rest of the app, I get the impression that the author is likely going to factor security considerations into the picture in a big way in the future.

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