Comment by josephg
10 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Just a wrap-up.
It was a badly-written comment. I meant some apps (and background tasks) on my computer hang. Most deal with it, but a surprising number don’t. I gave up on sniffing with Terminal and other tools, trying to figure out which ones. I have a number of dev tools installed on my computer, and a lot of those have a … casual … approach to quality.
I have no issue admitting fault (I do it way too often), but I don’t really dig rewarding boorish behavior, so I just figured I’d leave it alone.
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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
> What applications to you make and where might I find them?
https://underpassapp.com
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How do you know they don't have telemetry?
I wrote them. I'm baffled by your question.
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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.
Have you tried using Linux?