Hacker News Reader

Comment by HeckFeck | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I can praise is the .NET Core ecosystem. C#, ASP.NET and EF is very comfy for web dev compared to my experiences with Java and its thousand moving parts.

That said, I still fear what may come. The decrees from on high concocted by the unscrupulous bugmen that are breathing absolute contempt for their users. Who can ponder their designs while maintaining his conscience?

View on HN

.NET Core would be great if it weren't tainted by the New Microsoft policy of turning all tools into spyware. Now you have to remember to set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 everywhere and meticulously ensure that it doesn't get stripped from the environment when launching subprocesses, changing users, etc.

I remember the discussion about that which boiled down to: it’s good for you - shut up.

That was the thing that kicked me over the fence. Open source doesn’t matter if the stewards do not have your best interests at heart.

The list of what is gathered: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr...

As you can see, it is system data and basic crash reporting, something that helps with the health of .NET ecosystem and has no monetary value.

They used to gather all command line arguments until they later decided that (oops!) it's "not acceptable per our privacy policies"[0] and they really shouldn't have been doing that. They have also had issues with anonymization not being implemented properly, the opt-out mechanism not working in some edge cases, forgetting to even tell users about the need to opt out, and who knows what else. The risk of accidentally exfiltrating your data one way or another seems pretty high.

Also, monetary value is not the only reason you might want to keep information private.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145#issuecomment-22010...

The issue dates back to the release candidate of the second version of .NET Core, 8 years ago. Surely we can do better than "it used to be bad at x point in time and this can never be rectified".

I like my privacy more than the next guy, but you are not arguing in good faith (which is all too common, because people like to use much inferior technologies and make .NET a scapegoat, instead of learning better and ceasing idiotic self-sabotage)

Edit: Heh, in HN jail. In response to the comment - you should apply this logic to the languages steered by Google, Oracle and Apple. .NET is completely unrelated to Recall and whatever happens to it, it could have been as well a separate company.

Microsoft does not make it easy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

See, for example, the Recall debacle. https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ev...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com