Comment by locknitpicker

> (...) I don't see the current system as particularly bad and find the appetite to restore "untrustworthy" cloud functionality a bit amusing.

This is a very dubious opinion to hold. Taking your claim about local mode at face value, there is absolutely no reason to disable monitoring when working on LAN mode. You need to go way out of your way to implement that restriction so that it works differently when the thing phones home or not. You are free to criticize implementation decisions that you feel make it "untrustworthy" but those are trivial to address if you think about it.

I really recommend you to reassess your whole philosophical stance on having corporations prevent you from using what you bought and paid for.