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Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

robertheaton.com

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked myself and the answer is no. Now what? I have dealbreaker problems with Linux and Mac. I'm also not going to pull a Terry Davis and make my own OS, and I'm not willing to participate in the circus that is open source either. With these in mind, what am I supposed to do, move to the mountains and live the life of a hermit? Once again, not happening. It'd appear that I'm between a rock and a hard place - exactl…

"What option do I have left after rejecting every other option?" I guess the answer, for you, is that you have no other option. For others, I'll say that I've had 3 Wacom tablets (I keep upgrading), including one with a screen and they have all worked well enough with open-source drivers. They're popular enough that you can do some research to know how they will work on Linux.

> I guess the answer for you, is that you have no other options.

Yes, which is exactly what I was getting at. I'm not in the situation where if only I spent some time on introspection and "asked myself", I'd all of a sudden have this lightbulb moment that hey, what if I just switched to Linux or bought a Mac instead, despite what people like GP might like to think.

This is a lot like when people try to - sometimes kindly, sometimes not - invite people's attention to the fact that e.g. they're fat. As if somehow this key piece of realization was the only thing keeping them from starting on a lifestyle change and taking ownership of their diet. It's juvenile there, and it's juvenile here too. Except in this case, I'd argue it goes even further: it's willfully dishonest. As if it was normal that the only way out were the options listed. As if all these options were playing on an equal field.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#22
post #18

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught: https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community... Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection. What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it . If you ru…

>What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it. No thank you, I want to keep my OS with apps that are powerful and that doesn't show me a useless permission prompt every five minutes.

Why useless? Permission prompts were the best inventions of mobile OSes, there should be much more of them actually.

On desktop there could be ways added to sidestep them, eg. defined in bulk in a processname.permissions file somewhere protected.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#23

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught: https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community... Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection. What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it . If you ru…

I asked myself and the answer is no. Now what? I have dealbreaker problems with Linux and Mac. I'm also not going to pull a Terry Davis and make my own OS, and I'm not willing to participate in the circus that is open source either. With these in mind, what am I supposed to do, move to the mountains and live the life of a hermit? Once again, not happening. It'd appear that I'm between a rock and a hard place - exactl…

FreeBSD?

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked myself and the answer is no. Now what? I have dealbreaker problems with Linux and Mac. I'm also not going to pull a Terry Davis and make my own OS, and I'm not willing to participate in the circus that is open source either. With these in mind, what am I supposed to do, move to the mountains and live the life of a hermit? Once again, not happening. It'd appear that I'm between a rock and a hard place - exactl…

FreeBSD?

Let's also not forget NetBSD. /s

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#27
post #18

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught: https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community... Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection. What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it . If you ru…

>What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it. No thank you, I want to keep my OS with apps that are powerful and that doesn't show me a useless permission prompt every five minutes.

You should be able to choose to switch off security as you wish. You should also be able to choose to leave it on.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#28

(2020) I have an old unbranded Chinese tablet that came with a CD-ROM containing the driver, configuration utility, their source code , and even a datasheet for the MCU it used. A huge contrast between merely selling a product, and trying to control the whole "experience". IMHO we need more of the former, but corporate attitudes strongly encourage the latter.

I have an old Wacom tablet on the larger size that I got for free from a company getting rid of stuff. I can plug it in today to my Mac and it just works. No driver software needs to be installed. This blew me away that it was that easy to use. I thought for sure I'd have to surf some hellish landscape of sketchy websites offering software for long since deprecated hardware. Maybe I don't have all the functionality of some of the buttons on the tablet, but I've never found myself needing them. As long as the pen on the tablet moves the cursor, I'm happy. The fact that it even detects pressure was just icing on the cake. I find that to be better than having the source code available. Old source code can still be a nightmare to compile on modern systems.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#29
post #11

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught: https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community... Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection. What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it . If you ru…

> What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it. That's there because it's been in there forever in the win32 API, and changing that would break applications. For example, a long time ago, I wrote a small application that would iterate through a list of executables, launch each one seq…

If the user is prompted to give permission for the application to have access to this information then at least you know which ones are doing it and can avoid using them if you are worried about it.

Re: Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)

#30

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught: https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community... Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection. What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it . If you ru…

> the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it. IIUC, X11 had the same problem, but Wayland allows sandboxing to prevent this? And MacOS has some degree of sandboxing? But many applications require "Accessibility" permission that similarly gives far too many privileges?

> IIUC, X11 had the same problem, but Wayland allows sandboxing to prevent this?

Wayland to my knowledge is isolated by default, with non-isolation being opt-in by both compositor and application via FD shenanigans, but don't quote me on the specifics.

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