The point is that it’s a loophole in privacy laws so they don’t have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it’s anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don’t actually look into it or understand the implications.
Ad firm money.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but my first instinct when I see stuff like this is they have a secret contract with an advertiser and are selling this information.
Like if you’re going to use Arch btw, go all the way and use actual Arch.
Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as “personal information” under privacy laws.
It’s not fucking over Microsoft, it’s prevent Microsoft from fucking us over. Microsoft is not the victim in this.
And as always, the majority response to this will absolutely be something along the lines of “I support writers but you can fuck right off if you expect me to inconvenience myself in the slightest most superficial way in solidarity with you because actually having to modify my behavior in the simplest way is where I draw the line.”
Trusting your security to Google is literally like trusting a fox to guard your hen house.
Especially ironic considering they were horribly unreliable for long term data storage
This video from a security researcher says that pretty much every software that uses WebP was affected though, and once the issue was discovered, Google made commits in their own codebase to “fix” it. Which suggests it’s an issue with the upstream source code that Google provided to everyone else.
Easiest way to do this: Turn the modem off after bed time (you will also lose internet)
Most expensive but still easy way to do this: Buy a “smart router” with time-based parental controls (lets you use the internet at night).
Nerd way to do this: Pihole with a script that enables and disables certain blocklists at certain times (free and open source, because fuck “smart” products)
Honestly it wouldn’t even be that hard to release full translated versions of existing programming languages. Like Python in Punjabi or Kotlin in Chinese or something (both of which already support unicode variable/class/function names). Just have a lookup table to redefine each keyword and standard library name to one in that language, it can literally just be an additional translation layer above the compiler/interpreter that converts the code to the original English version.
It’s honestly really surprising that non-English speakers have developed entirely new programming languages in their own language (unfortunately none of which are getting very widespread use even among speakers of that language), but the practice of simply translating a widely used and industry standard English programming language doesn’t seem to be much of a thing.
If I ever make my own programming language, I’m probably going to bake multi-language support into the compiler. Just supply it with a lookup table of translated terms and the code in that language.
Because it supports Unicode as variable/class/function names and Unicode includes all the characters humans have ever used, even dead languages (I assume for historians to digitize ancient texts?)
Also isn’t English the only European language not to call Pineapples some variation of “ananas”?
We call them “dirt beans” in Mandarin which is an improvement I guess?
Can’t wait to have Google’s telemetry injected into my Linux apps
I’d argue that the internet has made this problem worse, not better.
In fact, I’d argue that the internet has taken away tons of people’s ability to admit they’re wrong because there’s always an echo chamber that will support you on even the dumbest of beliefs and anyone fact checking anyone is seen as the enemy. You see this on places like Facebook and YouTube comments where someone will make a claim, other people will think it makes sense on a cursory glance and express their agreement, then someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will politely correct them and everyone will gang up on them because they’ve disrupted the vibe, and simply because of that the unanimous decision is made that the correct answer is in fact wrong and is a government conspiracy.
“Bro full self driving is 5 years away bro trust me bro”