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VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

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Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#131

Post by jrockway »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #68
falcolas wrote: post #20

Telemetry is godsend for developers, since it lets them track down actual product usage and issues. Telemetry is a privacy nightmare for users, since it sends data to the developers outside of an average user's control - data which is probably easily associated with an individual and kept for eons (disk space is cheap after all). I think telemetry collection is starting to become a professional ethics issue for devel…

> Telemetry is godsend for developers, since it lets them track down actual product usage This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of software has turned to shit last decade or so. Look at it this way: Your average fire extinguisher sits mounted on a wall its entire life and is never actually used. You still…

I'm not sure software is getting worse. It does more, and there is more. A lot of complaints on HN are about businesses they don't like, or technology they thought should never have been invented. It's unfortunate that tracking you across the web is hugely profitable, but the reason that business works isn't due to software malfunction. The software is working great.

Certainly, there is a lot of software out there with poor polish. My pet peeve is that devices like multimeters that used to have segmented VFDs, so had a certain design aesthetic by default. Clean, straightforward, readable. Now those have moved to low resolution LCDs, so you notice that the font they picked is terrible, and the font rendering engine they picked is even worse. It just looks bad, in exchange for more flexibility and features.

But, none of this is indicative that the software itself is getting worse. In the 80s, trivial software bugs were literally killing people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 In terms of radiation therapy machines, the underlying business hasn't changed much; people with tumors want them to be killed, and the difference between now and 40 years ago is that the machine doesn't kill them because of integer overflows.

(One interesting note about the Therac-25 is that it reused software for previous models that had hardware interlocks that masked the software defects. They didn't have any telemetry on when the hardware interlocks triggered, so they didn't know that the hardware interlocks were masking bugs in the software when it came time to remove them. If they had the data, they might have kept the hardware interlocks, or fixed the bugs before 6 people died. So maybe lack of telemetry is a greater ethics issue than including it!)

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#133

Post by marginalia_nu »

jrockway wrote: post #131
marginalia_nu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Telemetry is godsend for developers, since it lets them track down actual product usage This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of software has turned to shit last decade or so. Look at it this way: Your average fire extinguisher sits mounted on a wall its entire life and is never actually used. You still…

I'm not sure software is getting worse. It does more, and there is more. A lot of complaints on HN are about businesses they don't like, or technology they thought should never have been invented. It's unfortunate that tracking you across the web is hugely profitable, but the reason that business works isn't due to software malfunction. The software is working great. Certainly, there is a lot of software out there wi…

Software is still killing people despite telemetry. Look at Tesla's autopilot.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#134

Post by pleb_nz »

What we need, and this may already exist, is away to sanbox apps with the ability to firewall of incoming and outgoing http request.

Does this exist?

What would be even better was a solution that had profiles for common usages and apps, and the profiles could be created by all and shared via a community or repo and could be extended and tweaked.

Does this exist, is it feasible, or does anyone have a better simpler idea?

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#135

Post by welder »

capableweb wrote: post #127
welder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode extensions are open source so the community should report and vscode should ban extensions behaving badly. That's the same way all plugin marketplaces work, nothing bad vscode is doing with their extension setup.

It's probably true that many Visual Studio Code extensions are Open Source, but there are plenty that are not. Here is one from a random person on the internet which has the license "All rights reserved": https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=LiamNevi... Here is another by Adobe that doesn't have a license linked to it (presumed proprietary): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=com-adob.…

Sorry, I meant you could see the source code not the source code's license.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#136

Post by treesknees »

pleb_nz wrote: post #134

What we need, and this may already exist, is away to sanbox apps with the ability to firewall of incoming and outgoing http request. Does this exist? What would be even better was a solution that had profiles for common usages and apps, and the profiles could be created by all and shared via a community or repo and could be extended and tweaked. Does this exist, is it feasible, or does anyone have a better simpler id…

On MacOS you can use Little Snitch [1] to do exactly this. You can watch all network connections per app, even grab a pcap of traffic just for the app as well. You can setup restrictions to block incoming and outgoing traffic. It basically is a per-app firewall.

[1] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#137

Post by 0x457 »

dogleash wrote: post #117
ajross wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of software has turned to shit last decade or so. This seems exactly backwards to me. No one who has ever managed a deployed product with good failure telemetry would say that it tells you "next to nothing". Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never c…

When was the last time[1] you saw a major consumer application [] crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! The apps I use are now riddled with hang bugs rather than crash bugs. Huzza.

Firefox. I googled "robots.txt forbid all robots", there was a blog post from Google. Opening that page would crash my entire browser.

Applications not often, but video games hard crash all the time.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#139

Post by alberth »

rcxdude wrote: post #121
nathanaldensr wrote: post #71

A warning for people who, like me, long ago disabled telemetry in Visual Studio Code: Microsoft introduced a new setting that deprecates the two older settings... and the new setting defaults to "all" [1]. I just noticed this now after double-checking my settings. Sneaky, sneaky, Microsoft (but still totally expected). [1] https://imgur.com/a/RbrsuyA You will want these three settings in your default settings JSON (t…

If the message is to be believed (and the source code does agree: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/d32b92bd7a49ce8667b... ), the old settings still apply, the new one may default to 'all' but the old settings will override it, so they've avoided turning telemetry back on for those who had disabled it (in fact if you didn't update the settings and for some reason had only turned off one of the telemetry option…

> @returns OFF, ERROR, ON

> ...

> return TelemetryLevel.NONE;

You gotta love how the documented function return value (TelemetryConfiguration.OFF) doesn't match the actual return value (TelemetryConfiguration.NONE).

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#140

Post by jrockway »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #133
jrockway wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure software is getting worse. It does more, and there is more. A lot of complaints on HN are about businesses they don't like, or technology they thought should never have been invented. It's unfortunate that tracking you across the web is hugely profitable, but the reason that business works isn't due to software malfunction. The software is working great. Certainly, there is a lot of software out there wi…

Software is still killing people despite telemetry. Look at Tesla's autopilot.

I don't know if that's an interesting data point. Humans are terrible at driving cars. AIs are terrible at driving cars. I'm not sure that Tesla is obviously doing a sub-par job here, as it's a challenging problem space.

The main effect of the telemetry in self-driving cars is that we can all Monday morning quarterback the exact defect that caused a particular crash. With human drivers, we don't have as much data to get to the root cause. If someone falls asleep at the wheel and drives into a truck, was it their medication? Their sleep schedule? An emotional conversation they just had? The music that the radio station chose to play? A combination of all of those factors? What actions do we take to prevent it from happening again?

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