Hacker News Reader

Comment by karatestomp | Hacker News Reader

I remember being able to watch network traffic and if you (or some other actual person on you network) weren't doing anything nothing would be there. Yes even if you had a few webpages open but weren't clicking anything. Now your machine's "idle" and you capture on your network interface and it scrolls at hyperspeed.

View on HN

I've been doing some network programming lately, specifically low level raw socket work. Sitting there with wireshark running the sheer volume of traffic with applications dialing home was kind of shocking.

I mean, I know it's happening, I (sadly) expect it to happen now. But seeing all the bits whizzing over the wire brought home just how much your machine is reporting about what you're up to.

This is upsetting for me, too. And for a few others. But actually very few people care because they just don't see it. The people who designed it this way take care that users at large have no idea what is going on.

It's really very sad, because users have no idea what is going on and there is no incentive for bad programs to improve (actually, there is generally incentive in the opposite direction, because it's work to write well-behaving apps). Users just know that they need to keep buying new computers and that their battery life is worse, but they can't figure out why so they point fingers at everyone but who they should actually be blaming.

Remember when shitty user-hostile spying wasn't a library you included that assured you in its readme it was "made with [heart] in California"? Ah, the days when only criminals and bigcos casually engaged in shady crap.

That's a somewhat unrelated discussion, but yes, I am not very happy with the current state of software where people think they are entitled to out-out analytics information coming off my machine.

Well, I remember the days when a message in Windows cropped up saying (standard at the time when a program crashed): "Do you want to send the error report to Microsoft" and my boss called me, asking a bit concrened, "Please, tell me honestly, what do you think - should we send them this error report?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com