51–60 of 329 posts
Yet another reason to ditch the antiquated Homebrew, and switch to the cross platform Nix: http://nixos.org/nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs https://blog.errright.com/switching-from-homebrew-to-nix/
It was nice back then. Packages didn't install themselves in /usr/local.
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> no personal info > Just your universally unique id ...
"oconnore" is a perfectly valid unique identifier on HackerNews that doesn't tie to anything about you if you don't have your email address in your profile. This is no different.
Set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 to opt out. The right thing to do would be to make it opt in, not opt out. (Which would not be without precedent. Debian's popcon is opt-in.)
Where's your reasoning? Homebrew gave theirs. Keep in mind that no personal info is ever sent. Just a random UUID.
Set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 to opt out. The right thing to do would be to make it opt in, not opt out. (Which would not be without precedent. Debian's popcon is opt-in.)
Disagree. Google Analytics is a network of companies that has agreed to privately collection information about users without their permission or even knowledge. It is malware that should not be included in Homebrew. The only ethical decision we can make as developers is not to use it.
"Malware" is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of forms of hostile or intrusive software, including computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, scareware, and other malicious programs. It can take the form of executable code, scripts, active content, and other software.
Set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 to opt out. The right thing to do would be to make it opt in, not opt out. (Which would not be without precedent. Debian's popcon is opt-in.)
Or, you could edit /usr/local/Library/Homebrew/utils/analytics.rb to send Google Analytics garbage (from random UUIDs) until Homebrew makes this feature opt-in.
Any rubyists want to provide a patch to do this?
The fact that they are transparent about this, that we can opt-out if we want and that they're open source makes me feel more than comfortable sharing anonymous usage information with them. Homebrew has been amazing for me!
Is an alert displayed to the user the first time it tries to send info to Google? If not, that is far from "transparent". It's good that they tell you how to opt out on the website, but I can't remember the last time I went to the website. Probably when I first installed Homebrew on this Mac.
Still littlesnitch is really awesome for the privacy conscious users.
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What is the mechanism in which Homebrew inserts itself into every shell session anyway? I had expected it to be loaded somewhere in some shell initialization script, such as .bashrc or .bash_profile, but I couldn't find anything.
It doesn't — by default, Homebrew lives in /usr/local/bin/, which is already in the default $PATH on OS X.
Is there some way to see the caller of a process? htop displays no parent in the tree view.
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Is an alert displayed to the user the first time it tries to send info to Google? If not, that is far from "transparent". It's good that they tell you how to opt out on the website, but I can't remember the last time I went to the website. Probably when I first installed Homebrew on this Mac.
Get littlesnitch on Mac and you won't need to rely on third parties alerting about outgoing connections, although I recon the when we're talking about something like homebrew it's not easy to vet every single outgoing connection. Still littlesnitch is really awesome for the privacy conscious users.