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Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

It's open source so I'm just going modify the telemetry program to send nonsense and publish my changes on shithub so anyone else who wants to monkey wrench Fedora's telemetry can do so (even if they don't actually run Fedora).

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This solves the problem only for you, and those users who are aware of the problem, have enough understanding to know that it is a problem, and also have the technical know-how to even use your published code. How many percent of the user base does this cover? Are you OK with implicitly recommending Red Hat/Fedora (by using it) when you know that most people will get caught by this?

That's assuming that gnu8's telemetry spoofing program only generates one machine's worth of spoofed telemetry data. If he thinks bigger than that (generate data from thousands of fake machines, launder the traffic through residential IP proxies, etc), he could be the source of the majority of the Fedora telemetry data. That would give him the ability to make Red Hat engineers do his bidding, which seems like a fun power to have.

So you'll sabotage observability for everyone else because you don't want to just opt out?

I hope shameless bad actors like you never use the software I write.

If you don’t add telemetry to your software then you won’t have a problem.

The world in general and open source in particular depends on bad actors like yourself being rooted out and chased away. Nothing to do with the specific issue here.

I’m not the bad actor, those who want to add telemetry to their open source software are. To the extent that jamming telemetry systems with false or inaccurate data discourages Fedora and others from adding telemetry to their software, I am making a positive contribution to OSS.

Stop trying to treat my computers like they are a part of your test lab.

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