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Comment by phoronixrly | Hacker News Reader

Calling out leople who trust software from ByteDance, and not calling out people who trust software by Microsoft (i.e. VSCode) is a bit hypocritic. Both are faceless corps that produce unethical software.

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Microsoft was not the subject of the post.

point is, both extensively use telemetry in vscode. I think only Codium is the build that tried to turn all that off. Not sure how successfully tho.

The point of the point was that it was highlighting a contrast with how VSCode normally works. If they were the same, this would not be a post about Bytedance, but a post about Microsoft.

Don't forget that the remote editing feature in VSCode has you install non-free binaries on the remote machines. It's not like netdir where it just wraps openssh.

I'm always surprised when corporate IT departments allow that given what's not allowed these days.

Corporate IT usually has a relationship and trusts Microsoft already. Not like it’s a small I trusted company.

And responsible for a huge amount of disk usage on our experiments shared machines (due to a bunch of students using vscode, with each user having their own copies of magic binaries). I wonder if there's an easy way to block it...

No? The non-free binary is the client not the server. There are free implementations of the client for Code OSS.

The server installed on the remote machine is part of vscode itself called the REH (remote extension host). It’s the core of the editor running in headless mode on the server.

Here is an example open source implementation of the non-free binary client (it’s a 4 files that call various editor APIs) https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss

This is REH entry (the binary installed on the remote machine) https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/...

VSCode is garbage software from a garbage company, too.

Microsoft's telemetry policies for VSCode aren't great, but there's a big difference between "defaulting to opt-in" and "sending even more data when the user turns telemetry off". Your post is a stupid and incorrect bit of whataboutism.

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