Re: Telemetry on by default kitty

[Jack Hill]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2021, Mark H Weaver wrote:

[…]

> However, I strongly believe that each Guix user should be given the
> opportunity to make that decision for themselves, i.e. that telemetry,
> auto-update checks, and more generally unsolicited network traffic
> should be disabled until the user has given informed consent.
>
> What do other people think?

I'm not sure I have too much to add to the discussion, but since I once 
submitted a patch to disable this type of telemetry⁰, I support the notion 
that programs should not generate network traffic unless they are asked to 
do so. As Mark says, it's more than just the two endpoints that can 
observe the traffic. Even encrypted traffic provides some information.

Perhaps opting-in can be another use case for parameterized packages. We 
could have our cake and still allow folks to opt-in without having to 
tediously configure or modify their packages.

On the note of trusting software authors, for me a lot of it is 
understanding the development process and analyzing if my interests are 
aligned with those the authors. However, that can be a complicated thing. 
In general, I'm much more trusting of community projects than ones with 
corporate sponsors. Track record also counts too, so I'm glad that Bone 
referred us to the upstream discussion. I'll probably spend more of my 
time looking for problems in future releases of projects like kitty and 
audacity¹ than more trusted (to me) projects like goffice.

Even if we're not able to catch everything, auditing source can still be 
useful. I found an information leak in innernet (not packaged for Guix 
yet) in part because the authors where kind enough to point it out in a 
comment². Perhaps auditing/patching is a test that is well suited to 
combining efforts with folks beyond Guix. That can be either in dedicated 
projects like Icecat or ungoogled-chromium, or simply by looking at what 
patches and configuration options other package distributions apply. Of 
course we can also share anything that we learn.

⁰ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/40360
¹ https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/audacity_telemetry/
² 
https://github.com/tonarino/innernet/blob/46d97831094d04fe3ad802a4bf2ac645e09d568c/publicip/src/lib.rs#L3-L4

Well, I guess I ended up adding more comments than I thought I would. Hope 
they're helpful!

Jack