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Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

robertheaton.com

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Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#11

Post by xoa »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

I never thought I would want a "walled garden" on my desktop, but these shit software stacks that companies are integrating into their products are forcing me to want to fight back to lock down my machine. I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. A smart initial…

>I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic.

Does Little Snitch not meet your needs there? I believe even with the challenges caused by Apple's unfortunate elimination of kernel extensions it's still powerful and effective. The GUI is solid and I've had solid success over many years with it for this sort of thing.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#12

Post by rocqua »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

I never thought I would want a "walled garden" on my desktop, but these shit software stacks that companies are integrating into their products are forcing me to want to fight back to lock down my machine. I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. A smart initial…

It doesn't take much of a walled garden to prevent mouse drivers from surreptitious network access. It only takes a capability based permission system.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#13

Post by Willamin »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

I never thought I would want a "walled garden" on my desktop, but these shit software stacks that companies are integrating into their products are forcing me to want to fight back to lock down my machine. I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. A smart initial…

If you're on MacOS, there's a third party program that's relatively simple to use that does exactly what you've described: Little Snitch

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#14

Post by JKCalhoun »

xoa wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

I never thought I would want a "walled garden" on my desktop, but these shit software stacks that companies are integrating into their products are forcing me to want to fight back to lock down my machine. I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. A smart initial…

> I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. Does Little Snitch not meet your needs there? I believe even with the challenges caused by Apple's unfortunate elimination of kernel extensions it's still powerful and effective. The GUI is solid and I've had solid succ…

Thank (both of) you. I don't know why, I had always assumed Little Snitch was command-line. I'll play with it.

In my line of work I had used Charles (but no, that is not something I would consider was to use).

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#15

Post by JKCalhoun »

rocqua wrote: post #12
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

I never thought I would want a "walled garden" on my desktop, but these shit software stacks that companies are integrating into their products are forcing me to want to fight back to lock down my machine. I would love a simple utility that could not only neatly encapsulate and display the data being sent from my machine out on the network but also allow me to merely check a box to block that traffic. A smart initial…

It doesn't take much of a walled garden to prevent mouse drivers from surreptitious network access. It only takes a capability based permission system.

You're right. I shouldn't have said "walled garden" — a permissions system is a perfectly adequate solution.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#17

Post by shadowgovt »

haxiomic wrote: post #2

This was a wonderful read I think when I was younger I’d assumed the sheer number of technical users out there would mean it would be hard for companies to get away with things like this but these days I realize this sort of analysis and public exposition is actually rare and the number of skilled developers investing time in this is slim Perhaps collectively as a community we can create public bug and privacy bounti…

Not only is this kind of technical user rare, but public response to a post like this is also demonstrably rare. Of the people who read this, only a fraction will consider changing their configuration to stop Wacom from sending this data.

Incentives are well aligned for a corporation to just try it.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

#20

Post by krylon »

The sad thing about this is that there are perfectly valid reasons for Wacom to want certain information, like what hardware do their customers connect the drawing tablets to, what operating systems and applications do they use. This is useful information to have, in the sense that Wacom can choose where to put their resources, what applications to test for, etc.

But the very fact they are so damned sneaky about it makes it look really shady. Why not openly ask the users those questions and show them what information would be sent to the vendor? (And I am pretty sure Wacom is but one of many companies behaving this way.)

I vaguely recall using some applications built-in crash report a couple of years ago, and it was a) explicitly opt-in, and b) showed me (after asking me if I wanted to see it), verbatim, the data it was going to send to the vendor, including stack trace and stuff like that, and then asked me again if I wanted to send that crash report. (Unfortunately, I do not recall what software that was, though. sad emoji)

So I know it is not only possible to handle these things differently, but some people/companies actually do that.

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