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PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

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Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collecting website categorization is not "valuable for software improvement" and certainly does "violate privacy."

I didnt say it is. Just arguing against hate for all telemetry

Show me one example where telemetry made software better.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#232
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can only use it to write Windows software? Unless you mean VSCode which is cross platform.

I think they must mean legacy visual studio, rather than VSCode. VSCode is of course very portable. It also seems to be Microsoft’s (successful) attempt to get everybody to use a reasonable Linux-style workfow. If you look at it as a text editor and terminal in a tiling window manager, it suddenly makes sense that it became so popular.

There is nothing legacy about Visual Studio. There is simply no equivalent of its debugging and profiling capabilities in C++ and C# especially in graphics / game development. No such equivalent exist in Unix world including macOS. They set the bar.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#233
post #31

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry. Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

>> Everything works. I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for. For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

>For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

The caveat is that this is only true when applied to games on Steam. I play games that aren't on Steam, and I've not even bothered to see if they would run on Linux because it's just not worth my time.

(No, I do not expect something in Japanese that communicates with DMM Game Player for user authentication and DRM shenanigans to work in Linux.)

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#234
post #31

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry. Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

Companies have not yet woken up to the idea that implementing this kind of telemetry is effectively leaking their private business data to third parties (competitors even).

Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying.

Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops?

If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#235
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll rationalize their behavior, just like most of us do. "All the other companies are already doing it", "No one cares about privacy", "It's not my decision", "We need this data to help the customers".

Well let's ask HN: How many of us click accept on those annoying cookie dialogs or have an extension do it for them? And how many take the time to find the reject button and/or install appropriate extensions that will do the rejection? I'm in the second category but I'm sure the first one is the majority, mostly because they just don't care.

"I have resigned myself to everything insisting on taking as much of my personal data as it can possibly manage, and have already been worn down too much by so many years of trying to navigate it in ways that protect myself, so now I just sadly click accept so that I can get on with my life" is not the same as "I support the right of companies of all types and sizes to take all of my data to do whatever they want with."

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux. I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI. People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including righ…

If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it. Also, "power user friendly" but hates CLI..... I see. You might have to hand in your power user card over that one I am a diehard windows user but the OS's affinity for burying settings in nested, labyrinthine setting dialogs gets old super fast.

"You could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months"

"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"

And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.

I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#237
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything just works No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with ce…

It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it. And it's still a miserable experience. On the other hand, if I just install a batteries included Linux distro I get something I'm not necessarily thrilled about, but I can go pretty much straight to work. And if I spend a few days, I can set up a system that's exactly tailored the way I want it to be, eats an order of magnitude less…

> It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it.

I guess it's what you're used to. I don't find Windows decrapification to be that much more effort than Linux configuration.

> it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware

For your use case, presumably not.

The ship seems to have sailed for upgradable Apple hardware (and I expect Apple did their homework and discovered 90% of Mac Pro systems were never upgraded anyway) but I still appreciate the advantages of hardware-software integration, nice form factor and battery life, unified CPU/GPU memory, etc.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I feel ashamed, but that doesn't stop me. I put considerable thought into the ethics of storing data and letting that data get inaccurate and harming people. Same with providing that information to people whose goals actively cause harm. But I'm here for the war, not the individual battles. I raise objections and sometimes I can make a difference. This is one I'm going to lose most of the time. So I say my bit an…

Who are the parties in this war? It sounds like it's you v. everyone else.

The battles are usually things like invasive user tracking, insecure storage of PII (comprehesive credit reports), locking people out of accounts without recourse, dinging people's credit scores, giving out (potentially incorrect) information to police without warrants, etc.

So, upper management, government agencies, finance departments, and marketing departments.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guards at Auschwitz were not there to make business decisions for the country as a whole, just there to guard the camp, so they didn't have to feel bad about the human ash landing on their clothes every day.

> The guards at Auschwitz were not there to make business decisions for the country as a whole, just there to guard the camp, so they didn't have to feel bad about the human ash landing on their clothes every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law No need to say that how easy it is to brush off that kind of argumentation for the fallacy it is.

Godwin's law does not mean that any comparison involving Nazis is automatically a fallacy.

In this case, it was a relevant comparison. Court cases involving former concentration camp staff have established that "I just work here" is not a particularly strong defense. If your work enables harmful actions, and if you are aware of it, you may be found responsible for the consequences. Even if you don't participate directly in it. Even if you could face adverse consequences (including death) for refusing to do your job. And even if someone else would likely just take your place.

Re: PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default

#240
post #31

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry. Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

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