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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

In a former job, I had to inspect network traffic on my mac. So I install Charles, open it up, and start looking around. I was astounded how much network activity is going on that I had no idea about.

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Apple would never write software that scans your files and reports material your XOR USG does not like, without your knowledge.

This must be sarcasm.

Poe's Law in action.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

This is an instance of "X would never do Y" with Y a quite specific thing.

Which I usually take for sarcasm.

Here I'm quite sure it is a reference to a quite recent event.

Yes it is:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/if-you-build-it-they-w...

There was a linux distro I checked out a few years ago that routed every connection through tor and also asked for permission for every app connecting to the internet and I was similarly astounded by the fact that pretty much everything is sending some sort of data and people knew nothing about

Yeah, even Linux is crazy-chatty these days. I miss sniffing packets on a home or small office network and being able to follow what was going on without any filters. Now even on a smallish network, all your "idle" devices are spitting out packets constantly, so with "nothing going on" WireShark scrolls so fast with 20+ different interwoven conversations that it's impossible to follow. And god forbid you have any browser tabs open, since so many chat constantly in the background now.

Everyone decided that "telemetry" isn't spying and is totally fine (it obviously fucking is and it absolutely is not, respectively). Plus stuff like Bonjour came along.

Which distro are you talking about?

Macs have always had incredible network use, even way back in the dialup days when I started working with them.

The software seems to be designed to assume a perfect, exceedingly fat network connection at all times, and that all processes can do what they want with it.

In all the years I've been using Macs, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the OS that says, "Oh, the person is sending e-mail over a crappy cellular connection. Maybe now is not the best time to download a multi-gigabyte software update."

I don't know what the situation is like on the Windows side, but I've always assumed that Apple bungs gigabit ethernet into the houses and cubicles of all of its developers, and they never have to connect to things in the real world.

this needs clarification -- the Operating System under Mac OSX is designed during the Great-TCPIP-Expansion, and is NOT chatty, in fact things that were chatty were slapped down regularly. Since then, the MBAs at Apple Inc have built their "I Phoney" world, and certainly have added stupid chat. The details matter, for those that wish to move forward

Windows allows the user to mark a connection as limited/metered which supposedly reduces background usage of services like OneDrive and Windows Update. I'm not aware of the degree of impact and what is allowed despite the setting. There is a secondary mechanism to reduce background usage when enabling Battery Saver mode.

Windows updates (and other first and third party downloads) can be downloaded through the background intelligent transfer service (BITS) which uses idle bandwidth, and throttles the download when something else is using the pipe.

Then along came Windows 10 and its so-called Delivery Optimization Service (should rather be called Denial-of-Service service), which spams literally dozens of simultaneous TCP connections for downloading updates and thereby effectively monopolises your whole home's internet connection.

(Don't know if this has ever been fixed because I've since kept Delivery Optimization turned off and rely on BITS instead, which does indeed seem to work without causing any bandwidth shortage incidents).

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