Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

From the README:

> 4. To help us improve the editor, Atom sends usage information to Google Analytics. See [atom/metrics](https://github.com/atom/metrics) for details.

That is quite horrible in my opinion. Do I want an application on my computer that constantly sends information to Google and Github?

What kind of information is it sending? (from the link)

Collected Data

+ A unique identifier that is generated by computing the SHA-1 of the machine's MAC address.

+ The screen width and height

+ The version of Atom being used

+ The name of each item opened in a pane such as EditorView, SettingsView, and MarkdownPreviewView

+ The amount of time the current window was open for

+ The amount of time the current window took to load

+ The amount of time the app took to launch

Item no. 4 is the critical one. I really don't like this. However, you can apparently disable this:

> If you do not want this information reported, disable this package from the Metrics section of the Settings view `(cmd-,)`.

(edit: removed typo)

That is disturbing. I've had *.google-analytics.com nullrouted ever since I heard of GA.

> SHA-1 of the machine's MAC address.

There's only 2^48 MAC addresses, there are 2^160 SHA-1 hashes. With computing power at where it is today, a bruteforce over the MAC space wouldn't take long.

On the other hand, spoofing the data is also an alternative way of opposition...

> a bruteforce over the MAC space wouldn't take long

Indeed, best supercomputers are running today around 10 petaFLOPS (= 10^16 FLoating-point Operations Per Second) and there are 2^48 ~= 10^15 possible MAC addresses.

A FLOP is quite a lot simpler than a SHA-1 hash, however.

The Bitcoin network might be a better comparison since it uses doubled SHA-256; currently it's at around 3e16 hashes per second, or 6e16 SHA-256 operations per second. That's enough to hash all possible MACs in less than a second.

How dare they collect usage data to improve their free product!!!

It's not free (as in speech nor beer). Unless something has changed (I haven't been following), it will become paid after the beta period is over.

Sorry to tell you, it is not free. https://atom.io/faq "We haven't settled on pricing yet, but you can expect it to be competitively priced compared to similar editors."

If one takes Vim, Emacs, or Light Table as 'similar', then that would imply free...

I believe that the final product isn't going to be free - so that changes the landscape of the argument. Then again, maybe they won't have analytics in that version.

Note: I'm not making a comment on it being a paid for app - they've released bucket loads of open source code they wrote to create the editor. For that they should be praised.

It doesn't matter whether it is free or not. My only aim was to provide information that might be relevant for some people interested in trying out Atom (admittedly I mixed this information with my personal position towards Google and the ever-present tracking aka surveillance) so that they know the implicit price of its usage.

You are free to use Atom or anything else, but you should always have as much information available as possible to correctly judge what you pay for any given thing.

Except you aren't providing information in a vacuum - you are also providing a negative personal opinion. I would rather see responses which purport to educate include a more balanced perspective such as the potential benefits such analytics might confer to end-users in the long run.

I fully respect peoples right to privacy. I just wish those who frequent Hacker news were more accepting of the fact that privacy is a trade off; one which often comes at the expense of the benefits of sophisticated analytics.

Are you serious? You expect me to provide a Fox News fair and balanced response in any of my comments on Hackernews? I could understand your point if I would have tried to be polemic, but I surely wasn't.

The other position was already provided for by github and numerous other posters, while I pointed out a fact that was not yet mentioned.

By the way, "benefits of sophisticated analysis" for whom? Google's ad revenues? I actually agree that github could provide a better product with the information gathered, but I really don't think that google should be in between me and github.

isn't that the purpose of the free software community? you find a malicious feature then you modify the software source code and release a clean version for interested people?

Executing analytics code consumes CPU and network resources that I pay for so I do think people should have a say in what a third party does with them.

If it's "free" then you're the product (in this case, a promotion for Github).

And I think I have the right to refuse to be sold if there are better alternatives. They'll either have to step up their game (with FOSS) or lose me.

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