I installed a firmware update on my router, and discovered it both adds telemetry and breaks the navigation in firefox. 🤦‍♀️

It also started complaining that my password isn't secure (despite its length) because it doesn't contain a symbol.

Good freaking job.

A faster, better YouTube they said, 'YouTube needs permissions to Contacts, Location, SMS, Microphone, Device ID and information', they said. :/

I'm good with a slower, worse YouTube.

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

*dad's w10 computer running super slow*

*checks task manager*

100% disk usage

*checks whatever-the-advanced-system-monitor-is-called*

*Compattelrunner.exe is at the top of the list in disk usage*

*searches online to find what the hell that is*

"Compattelrunner.exe collects program telemetry information if opted in to the Microsoft EatASackOfDicks Customer Experience Fuckup"

Telemetry is supposed to be disabled on this computer.

What the fuck Microsoft, if you want to straight out lie to my face as a customer at least try to not be so obvious that you basically lock down my computer with your telemetry shit.

Can we talk about changelogs for a second?

Almost every major app in the play store has changelogs like "Improving your experience" or "We did some changes to enhance your experience".
Wtf is this bullshit. Is it that hard to write the actual changes in the changelogs so that I know what got changed, huh?
Guess its kinda hard to write " We are shoving more telemetry crap down your throat" in a changelog.

Fuck sake.

Microsoft motherfucking Windows. (even though its an OS, it's software)

It's always brought me tons of issues and I'm starting to think that Microsoft built in some AI system which identifies when a Windows disliker uses it and starts acting weird/producing issues since (I have to use windows for some stuff at work) I'm always getting issues that nobody else gets in my team, and I've had this since I started using it at all.

And the fact that it has a frontdoor (I don't even think this is a backdoor anymore) built in... I mean, I definitely did NOT give consent to reinstall Microsoft Edge and I don't want it either (it appeared without any updates).
Then, you cannot fully disable telemetry anymore which is kind of a hard requirement for my job, most of the time.

Yes, Microsoft (and) Windows can go die in a fucking fire.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

But why?
btw Running on an i5-4590...

My grandpa is using his computer for video editing and creating photo books. His setup was:
- A 100GB SSD for C
- A 1TB HD for D
The problem:
He never had more than 6GB free on his C Drive because somehow Windows and his programs filled it all with some utter bullshit which couldn't be removed or whatever.

So I promised him to install Linux for his Emails and Surfing and create a Windows 10 VM for him to use his programs.

The Linux installation from downloading a iso over creating a bootable drive to actually installing it was faster than finding the fucking Windows 10 Iso.

Which was about the same time as installing fucking windows because this bullshit prints out one fucking line at a time and then waits for you to read it for 15 motherfucking seconds before printing the next line.

And don't get me started on the fucking telemetry.

Imagine

websites didn't use unnecessary cookies,
JavaScript was only used when needed,
no trackers, no ads, no telemetry, no user
data saved when it doesn't benefit the user.

*Wakes up in cold sweat*

Ubuntu 18.04 will be sending basic telemetry to Canonical by default. Great for people like me who have to use Linux for work and want a better UX. 😀

Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide.

According to report of ZDNet: The CCPA (America's privacy legislation) came into effect on January 1, 2020, offering Californian users data-protection rules. Much like Europe's GDPR, the CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information is collected about them and to be able to access it. While the law technically only applies to data processed about residents in California, US. But Mozilla notes it was one of the few companies to endorse CCPA from the outset. Mozilla has now outlined the key change it's made to Firefox, which will ensure CCPA regulations benefit all its users worldwide. The main change it's introducing is allowing users to request that Mozilla deletes Firefox telemetry data stored on its servers. That data doesn't include web history, which Mozilla doesn't collect anyway, but it does include data about how many tabs were opened and browser session lengths. The new control will ship in the next version of Firefox on January 7, which will include a feature to request desktop telemetry data be deleted directly from the browser.

I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".

Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?

Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.

But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.

The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).

Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).

I think I'm having a "return to monkey" phase.
What the fuck are we doing?

Free VPN's, free cloud storage, smartphones and stupid telemetry/uSaGE aNaLYtiCs, password managers, social media, content farms, cheap wifi enabled smart home and 'intelligent' cars.

I'm starting to hate it all.

Look at how many people (including myself, sadly) is glued to their fucking datahoarding multimedia shitdevices (known as 'smartphones'). While sitting in a room filled with every fucking small appliance that needs an app, wifi and phones home to who the fuck knows.
Even my fucking dishwasher has an app and wifi enabled so I can start the dishwasher outside the wifi network.

How the fuck did we get here?

Why the hell must Microsoft always be dickhead about the telemetry.
Take one beautiful NET.CORE. I make an app for myself, deploy it only to find out that those data-hungry arses have built-in default enabled telemetry and the only way to disable it is to set one dick-long env. variable:
DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT="1"
Seriously ??
No way to exclude it completely, you have to sweat blood everywhere it runs.
Consent ? Hardly, just small line during installation...
I swear everything MS touches turns into spyware...

I've had my current laptop for 3 years now. Whatever "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" needs to find out by reading my HDD at a rate of 8 MB/s for minutes after every startup, it should have found years ago.

its been there since many years, but:

When did we turned the wrong way and made it acceptable that Windows can blantly say in my face that i cannot deactivate the transmission of data unless i have the "Business" Variant of their Software. Its called Windows 10 PROFESSIONAL. Why are there no international Laws against that? Where was the molotov throwing mob when this became the norm?

Additonally. that cute telemetry service consumes a considerable amount of cpu and disk power from time to time.

and no, Linux is not an alternative. It never was. There is proprietary software and driver sets used for lab equipment and machines that cannot run under linux, noone will ever have the time to tool something for it and the user base is too specific to hope for any community solution.

sidenote: even Level 0 STILL transmits data. I want mode -1

Open source software repositories don't deserve contributors like JamesCrook. It's a shame, really, that maintenance befalls on them.

Why so much hypocrite Devs here ?
Examples :
I don’t use VScode because it sends telemetry.
Same for Windows 10
Same for half other products.
Like YOU don’t collect telemetry in apps YOU build. And if you don’t, have fun debugging without any data beside “It doesn’t work” comments !

There it fucking is again...

The legendary spyware "Antimalware Service Executable".

I changed the entry in the regedit. Tried to delete it with every possible tool. Tried to "chmod" it in the Windows way to be able to delete it as an admin. Doesn't work.

I swear in the name of bloody satan. This shit is doomed. It cannot be removed even if your shit begins to burn.

Microsoft, fucking remove it.
It is not a fucking feature!

Your windows updates fucking suck, your compatibility telemetry whatever the fuck you call these retarded ass "features" anymore fucking suck, your windows defender sucks.

Is there anything that doesn't suck in the features that you produce? I don't fucking think so. Fucking die for fucks sake.

Apple is overpriced, but at least they do their job well. Not like you, you fucking scumbags!

JESUS!

~dev, not in front of computer stuff

Playing with the controller and power management using the torque sensor, managed to get this flatland cook-off going today on the fat tire ebike with only 50watts of assistance. Efficiency gains over stock of 28%! 30mph on a bike feels ridiculously unsafe, but the looks you get from cars are even better.

Love being able to gather all this telemetry (GPS, elevation, pulse, durations), gives me stuff to fish through and data to play with.

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

This is how you do it, holy shit. I should not have to opt out of shit like this but rather opt in. Fucking thank you cordova

That feeling when you fix your 100% disk usage.
P.S. It was Superfetch AND "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry"

So yesterday (Oct 7th) I got this email, inviting me to a telemetry conference.

Does anyone have a DeLorean to lend?

This might be controversial, but hear me out. I actually really like Windows 11.

I know needing an MS account, telemetry data, TPM, etc... are disqualifiers for some. I get that. And, I'm not suggesting that I'm going to blow out my Linux systems to install it at home.

But, being forced to use Windows on my office PC - I much prefer the feeling of 11 to 10.

Also, the "new" terminal is actually really nice.

Funny fact and rant at the same time.

I disabled auto update on all my chromium based browsers I use to make sure they don't send any telemetry in background os process, because all companies that make chromium based browsers run the process in background when browser is not running.

The only one that do it during browser running is firefox.

Half a day wasted. FUCK!

I use grafana loki and mimir/prometheus for telemetry. A few days ago I queried loki to see if logging is still working. Yesterday I changed the datasource to mimir, changed the query parameters to get metrics from another env, ran the query, and... Querier [mimir] crashed.

Wtf.
Error says it got too much data to chew on.

So I spend 4 hours playing with the querier and grpc limits, balancing between limit errors and OOMKills [2G ram].

I got suspicious about oomk. Why would it...

Then I tried to shrink the timeframe to 15min. Still oomk. Down to 5min -- now it worked. But the number of different metrics returned was over 1k

then I look once again at the query. And ofc it is ´{env="prod"}´

turns out, forgetting that you're querying metrics with a logs' query is an expensive and frustrating mistake. Esp. at 3am.

idk why it even returned me anything...

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)

Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.

Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.

Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.

Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".

Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.

If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.

We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.

Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.

Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)

Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.

....

Et cetera et cetera.

Honestly my biggest rant in the past month hasn't been about code, It's about Windows 10 changing my desktop password to my Microsoft Account. I have certain security pet peeves and it just screams "telemetry"...

Is pycharm collecting telemetry in community edition?

so I offered to help a guy with his startup idea which is in the making for a year at least. (A telemetry data collection device, mind you). It's an unpaid internship with no strings attached, no contract, mind you.

I am nowhere near the programming pro like most of you guys here, so that's what I want to focus on improving.

First thing he tells me to do is a market research on competitors.... I thought I left that bullshit behind when I left business school..

If I want to work without getting paid, I'd rather stay at home and learn c++ and opencl, and work on the MSc thesis full time, thanks.

Do you think it's the right thing to do or should I give it time?

This one may be obvious but I thought I'd share it:

By default, Windows uploads analytical data of your machine to Microsoft via the Telemetry processes. These are quite the unnecessary and annoying resource hogs.

Well, you can turn that off by searching for Task Scheduler, looking for the Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry tasks and disabling them. Some of them are called Application Experience and Compatibility. I'm sure you'll find it.

As a side note, you can reschedule all of those tasks as you see fit. Some of them are useful and necessary but some aren't, causing bloat. For the useful ones, you can reschedule them once a month or something and not every day.

Pragmatism advised.

Settle an argument for our development team. We have infrastructure to report crashes when they occur, via a simple online form submission. The form provides basic fields for a description and an email address, and also posts some basic telemetry (rebuilding what it can of call stack, variables etc). Currently the email address is optional (you can submit the form and leave it blank). The form is not mandatory (the user can hit 'send' to submit online, 'save' to save the crash report to transfer in other ways, or 'cancel' to just ignore it entirely (irregardless of their choice, depending on where the crash has occurred, they may be able to continue using the application or it might exit).

A suggestion has been put forward to make the email address mandatory. Surprisingly, this has kicked off an incredibly polarising debate, so I thought I would put it to devRant to see what is the consensus here.

I'm trying not to bias the discussion by stating with the considerations at play, but would encourage you to think about them before chiming in!

WSL seems really cool from what i've been toying with it. WSL2 seems like it'll be even better and the integration with docker(another thing i'm toying with) looks interesting. as far as i can find though it's only on windows insider for now, and I don't like having telemetry on my main machine.

So i spent a good chuck of my day just setting up Hyper-v, learning about nested virtualization (so docker will work), setting up a win10pro vm, and i'm now in the process of setting this up to be a virtualized dev machine (not gonna be a one use only system cause i spent way too long on this shit) and setting up docker and wsl

I don't know much about docker or WSL beyond just some random stuff i've learned to toy with to simplify some things i do. but maybe this will give me a cool way to actively learn more about them and maybe use them as more than just boredom toys

Microsoft could use Visual Studio Code telemetry for spy purposes?

The timelines at my workplace are too short that it's impossible to actually build anything or observe procedures like testing, software techniques for maintaining oop code, telemetry and other things I may have learnt along the way

So application templates are the order of the day. They pull solutions off the shelf, edit the interface, hand over to clients at an alarming rate (sometimes, within a matter of days!). So yesterday, the cto asked for ways I can recommend that the team is made more efficient. He takes what I say very seriously, owing to Suphle's appendix chapter as well as the issues its blueprint set out to solve

Like I said, those do not apply here. I mean, the developers I've met are making do and winging it. I'm the one struggling to adapt to rummaging through templates and customise shit

Maybe I'm over thinking it cuz there's no sense in fixing something that's not broken. So far, only flaw I've observed (because the product designer has complained to me bitterly that the devs hardly ever translates his prototypes verbatim), is the need for a dedicated mobile developer (not that multifunctional, confused portfolio called "fullstack). But I didn't raise this since the time frames hardly even afford time for writing apis or writing mobile code. You'd be surprised to realise that everything a client can possibly ask for is already somewhere, built at a higher standard than you can replicate

My question now is, what other positive novelty can I bring aboard? How can this process be further optimised? If it can't, what suggestions outside regular software development or this work flow can I bring to the table?

Personally, I'm considering asking him to tell me bottlenecks if he has identified any. But it's very likely that he would already have begun working towards it if he knew them. I suspect he needs someone outside the system to see what is lacking or a new addition that could even be a distant, outlandish branch of the tech market, but drive the company towards more profit