I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.
Have you compared Alfred with Spotlight in Yosemite?
Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
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Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#22I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.
Now is probably the time to replace Spotlight as well. I wasn't terribly satisfied with it either for one simple reason: I open one specific file called "todo.taskpaper" with Spotlight all the time. So while I type t-o-d-... Spotlight doesn't remember that I want to open this specific file. I don't open anything else from Spotlight that starts with "tod" or even "to".
Quick test in Alfred: Seems to have learned that "to" = "todo.taskpaper" after 1 try.
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#23I like what I have seen with Apple's (apparent) focus on privacy with regards to iOS and the later iPhone models but this is pretty worrying - I'm not one to care about sending my data to some cloud service when it offers some tangible benefit to me, but some of this data is pretty intrusive and I can't see what benefit it is adding. Assuming everything here is accurate then Apple have screwed up and really ought to…
How else would they provide Apple Maps and web results in Spotlight though?
It actually has an explanation of exactly what it's sending and where in the Spotlight preference pane (click 'About Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy'), and exactly how to turn it off (you switch off 'Spotlight Suggestions' and 'Bing Search' in the list of things to search). It's not like this secret...
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#24Am I missing something here? The web search / autocomplete functionality contacts some servers.. You can disable them. Mail client tries to fetch known IMAP / SMTP info for a given domain to ease setup.
Are there some weird data being sent? Honestly, I might have missed some concerning communication but as far as I can tell, this is just for the sake of added functionality and can be disabled.
Expecting OS level stuff to work without network data at year 2014 seems somewhat bizarre. This is like complaining that apt-get leaks info to home, telling about the packages you install.
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#25Original discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479958
This one might be more relevant: "Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580 Hint: you have to uncheck two checkboxes that OS X explicitly tells you about in the very same Spotlight preferences, plus another one in Location preferences.
The spotlight preferences are not explicit. I would never have opened them without reading this news item first.
However, I can understand the philosophy of searching the wen and the desktop in parallel.
Ubuntu does the same (they search Amazon, not sure if also the web in general), and they also got a lot of flak for it.
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#26Am I missing something here? The web search / autocomplete functionality contacts some servers.. You can disable them. Mail client tries to fetch known IMAP / SMTP info for a given domain to ease setup. Are there some weird data being sent? Honestly, I might have missed some concerning communication but as far as I can tell, this is just for the sake of added functionality and can be disabled. Expecting OS level stuf…
I think the various surveillance and privacy revelations of 2011-2013 have different opinions about network data in 2014...
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#27I wonder if the iPhone does something similar
Yup. Fire up Charles SSL proxy and you'll observe very similar behaviour (at least with Mail and Spotlight/Safari)
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#28I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.
Have you compared Alfred with Spotlight in Yosemite?
I haven't looked a lot at Yosemites spotlight, can it do custom workflows? I've make Alfred ping multiple devices for sub-second status, create files based on input>bash script, close apps and so much more than that. I've completely replaced my snippet/text-expander with Alfred (just need a basic one anyway) and the fact that it can be semi-infinitely extended (scripting etc) is a nice ground to stand on.
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mac has not yet shown me advertisements for when I was looking for my files.
They weren't advertisements. They were product search results. And the concern wasn't about the fact that it shows products, but about the fact that data was being sent to Amazon (unencrypted as well, I believe).
" They weren't advertisements. They were product search results."
That line is blurred these days.
Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite
#30Microsoft has been doing this, too, since Windows 8.1, and it's going to do it even more aggressively with Windows 10.
I'm not saying it to mean that it's okay - in fact quite the opposite. Both are doing it wrong, and I hope they stop, or at least give me an intuitive (not hidden within 100 other settings) way to disable it.