Comment by josephg

Comment by josephg 2 days ago

30 replies

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About 10 years ago I tried installed Little Snitch on my laptop. I set it up to check with me every time any native app tried to connect to the internet. "Here we go" I thought. "I'm going to actually see what apps are doing!".

I think I naively thought I'd end up with 10 rules or something, blocking telemetry. Oh what a sweet naive child I was. Its constant. Everything on my computer seemed to use about 8 different telemetry and update services. The sheer number of packets of environmental waste being produced every second by modern computers is breathtaking. It never stops.

Reading this article, I wonder what would happen if you tried selling software the old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once. We'll mail you out a USB stick with the program on it. Our software does not access the internet." It would be terribly inefficient, but it'd probably be fun to try. It would definitely force a lot more rigour around releases & testing.

lapcat 2 days ago

> I wonder what would happen if you tried selling software the old way again. "Buy our software! Pay once. We'll mail you out a USB stick with the program on it. Our software does not access the internet."

FWIW all of my Mac and iOS apps are upfront paid, with no telemetry or server-side component.

Of course I don't distribute them via snail mail though.

I'm doing pretty well. I'm certainly not rich, and probably not making as much money as corporate software engineers in the US, but I'm doing better financially than the majority of people. It's not impossible to follow the old business model.

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  • TheNewsIsHere a day ago

    I preferentially select for this software model. What applications to you make and where might I find them?

    I eagerly and quickly pay for major version upgrades to the independent software I buy. I’d like that model to stick around.

    Reply View 2 replies
  • direwolf20 2 days ago

    How do you know they don't have telemetry?

    Reply View 3 replies
    • lapcat 2 days ago

      I wrote them. I'm baffled by your question.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • lastofthemojito 2 days ago

        I (and presumably the commenter you're responding to) initially read "all of my Mac and iOS apps" as "all of the Mac and iOS apps I use" instead of "all of the Mac and iOS apps I've written".

        Reply View 1 reply
        • lapcat 2 days ago

          Did you and the other replier stop reading my comment after the first sentence? Because the second and following sentences make very clear—e.g., "distribute"—that I was talking about apps developed and sold by me.

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throwaway132448 2 days ago

It’s got to the point where I turn off my WiFi now to do performance-sensitive work, because of the boost that killing all this background rubbish gives. Anything I need online I can just offload to my phone while my computer is offline.

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  • ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

    The problem with doing that, is that the standard TCP timeout is 60 seconds.

    All of a sudden, you are beset with 60-second hangs.

    Reply View 18 replies
    • embedding-shape 2 days ago

      If the computer doesn't have any online network connection, shouldn't it outright error? I understand that the timeout sucks when your network is not connected to the internet but still alive, then that's an issue, but if there is no connection at all, why would the timeouts matter?

      Reply View 1 reply
      • moduspol 2 days ago

        It wouldn't be able to open a TCP connection without knowing what IP address / interface to use.

        You're right--it should outright error. You should only see timeouts like that if you were dropping the packets from some middleware or middlebox, but your client still had a valid IP address.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • xnorswap 2 days ago

      You just gave me flashbacks of mistyping a folder share name on windows and having the whole PC lock up for a minute or two.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • [removed] 2 days ago
      [deleted]
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    • lapcat 2 days ago

      > All of a sudden, you are beset with 60-second hangs.

      No, that's not how it works. Frankly, I'm astonished to see this claim here.

      Reply View 13 replies
      • pixl97 2 days ago

        The problem with this is some apps do incredibly stupid things. Now I'm not saying the operating system itself, but I had some ide screw off and go into long pause mode when my laptop was in airplane mode.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • lapcat 2 days ago

          I'm sure there are stupid apps out there, but "the standard TCP timeout" was a misdiagnosis of the problem.

          Reply View 0 replies
      • ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

        Depends.

        I have a couple of apps on my computer that do exactly that.

        I am looking forward to learning how it does work...

        Reply View 10 replies
peddling-brink 2 days ago

And then Minecraft writes to a log 18,000 times a second, moaning about being unable to contact the telemetry provider until your disk fills up.

I don’t know if they ever fix that bug, because I uninstalled the thing. The third-party launchers didn’t have that problem.

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