Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#41

Post by izacus »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #36
facepalm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I meant with explicit was that they are explicitly described in the text that is shown on clicking the button called "About Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy." If one would never even open Spotlight preferences, then yeah, it is not possible to see, enable or disable those preferences. But then one should also not complain that it is impossible to enable or disable these preferences. By that logic, every applica…

I think a basic warning, information or other type of system making a user aware, that all their searches are being shared with 3rd parties is not an unreasonable demand.

Having people go to two preferences dialogs just to find out that contents of search box are being sent to USA datacenters is a dangerous dark pattern.

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#42

Post by tsenkov »

Disclaimer: I am building the mentioned app.

Pagehop (https://pagehopapp.com/), a launcher targeting only the Web, doesn't send your search queries to any server of ours, and allows searching in many different sources (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, YouTube, even some very specific sources such as jQuery's API documentation, the Mozilla Developer Network or the NPM archive). You can add sources (recipes) yourself.

We don't use a central server, instead the app taps into free web services (where possible) or scrapes the sites (where not).

It basically is a pack of many horizontal and vertical search engines with a single UI and the ability to use tools for post-processing of web results such as Regexes and Fuzzy Matching.

Pagehop queries are a simpler version of executing commands in the Terminal and you can pipe tools, one after another, just the same.

You should check it out (or not) - it has an unlimited, free and fully functional evaluation period (nothing is locked, just like SublimeText).

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#45

Post by timr »

userbinator wrote: post #40
eknkc wrote: post #24

Am 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…

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. No, the difference is that people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category.

"people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category."

The irony of your comment, of course, is that this is a brand new feature that allows spotlight to include web content. So no, you don't have a general idea of what the feature does.

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#46

Post by matthewmacleod »

userbinator wrote: post #40
eknkc wrote: post #24

Am 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…

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. No, the difference is that people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category.

Spotlight is no longer a tool for searching local files, and is now a search tool which combines local and remote data.

You can disable this feature.

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#47

Post by dvhh »

higherpurpose wrote: post #30

Microsoft 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.

citation required

Re: Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

#48

Post by vacri »

imdsm wrote: post #11
esolyt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

My concern was that if I wanted to buy something, I'd go online and look for it. If I wanted to run an application, I'd search for it. It was a case of extremely terrible UX and wasted my time having to disable it each time I installed Ubuntu.

'apt-get remove unity-shopping-lens' hardly consumes a lot of time, particularly since you make it sound like you installed Ubuntu often enough to make it onerous - that often, and you'd remember the command without having to web-search for it.
Post reply on HN