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Comment by Habgdnv | Hacker News Reader

I remember with nostalgia the mp3blaster. I spent years listening to it in my terminal. At one point I used only cli without graphical desktop on slackware and one of my TTYs was dedicated to it.

Turns out these times are forever gone - never to come back. The huge disappointment when I tried this on the first run to play a mp3 file from my local disk and it initiated outbound connection. Why a local CLI player needs outbound TCP connection to play a local file from my local disk?!?! The answer was in the source. It is called telemetry. Back then when I used mp3blaster we used to call this spyware, but the times had changed since then.

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The times haven't changed. It's still spyware, it's just been normalised.

Back in the day I used to use mpg123. It's still available, but most of the time today I use mpv (successor to "mplayer", handles video too, opens a separate window, zero chrome) or ffplay, since they have wider format support.

No playlist or even file management - they do show id3tags, that's about it. No telemetry, SaaS chicanery or "improvement" upgrades every few days, either.

OIC: https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp/blob/main/telemetry/teleme...

Should be easy to nerf, but the build instructions are kinda vague. Clone, and then what? Something like "go build" or something I guess.

Looks cool though

It's gone: https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp/commit/085734a86343a80176d...

I just woke up this morning and I am amazed. I am taking all my nasty words back and I starred the project and followed the author who reacted so fast to my dull negative feedback and this reaction shows how much he cares about the project.

Thanks for pointing this out, to me it seems quite a good response.

I wouldn't mind opt-in telemetry, but possibly the participation rate would be too low to make use of it.

My issue with telemetry is that 99% of software ends up not using it. Why have it? And definitely don't have it by default. Your users will come tell you what they want, making telemetry useless, especially when it's an OSS project you're mostly building for yourself.

Except that telemetry can give you more complete (and foolproof) information than what users report. But yeah, that could also be solved by having debug info that users can attach to their report, the app doesn't have to "call home" for that...

I agree, but it's a cost/benefit thing. Most OSS projects aren't big enough to do anything with the telemetry, so you're just paying in goodwill for no reason.

Opt-in via extension, fine. Opt-in via flag, unreliable. The spyware code should never be anywhere near the main codebase.

Yay! Also, I hadn't noticed an entire section about building from source. Sorry about that. Good work!

Woo, good on them

No personal data is collected

IP address (which can be geolocated) along with a unique identifier is not considered "personal data"? This is basically a tracking cookie. It also seems to use HTTP, which is itself widely fingerprintable based on what request headers it sends.

There's a config variable and a cli flag to disable.

That seems reasonable to me.

to disable

All such surveillance behaviour should strictly be OPT IN.

I saw it, it is NOT spyware. It just sends a random UUID. It is just a personal disappointment for the fact that it is something so simple as a console player and yet connects somewhere. But that's just me. I grew up in other times.

Also I just compiled mp3blaster and I am listening to it again. So cool!

If it phones home without explicitly asking the user for permission in advance, it's spyware.

You can still set up an mpd server: https://www.musicpd.org/ that runs on your local files.

I used to use mocp under Unix but nowadays it's just audio/zuke in 9front with plumber settings for playlists.

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