Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/nxvH8cW
The changes apply to the most recent version of vscode (version 1.61.0 released Oct 7).
The Vscodium project [0] exists and provides builds directly from the source.
This version has none of the user-hostile behavior! It also makes you realize Microsoft’s new round of EEE overreach when you see that the maintainers have to provide the extensions through their own repository and the default C# debugger doesn’t work for licensing reasons (everything else works perfectly).
Don’t trust Microsoft. Use the code they give you (which is generally fine), not their proprietary products (which are generally very much not fine).
[0]: https://vscodium.com
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
From Wikipedia:
>"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Isn't it also the case that pylance doesn't work and has some form of DRM to prevent it from being used with the open source version? I'm not saying that as a reason not to use the open source version, just wondering if Microsoft has already rounded the corner on that second "E" in EEE.
They’re still working on making them official.
One option if it's just like 1 file at a time is to use WinSCP with Sublime as your default editor and just open the file, edit, close, but again, obviously not great.
Why aren't the Atom people working on VSC instead?
If there's any confusion around this messaging it's because this discussion literally happened 2 days ago. I'll reopen https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/134660 to make sure we clear up confusion.
Windows 10 alone has something like 200 individual settings for disabling its various forms of telemetry. Office adds several dozen more. Dotnet itself has telemetry, then PowerShell on top of that. VS Code and Visual Studio both send telemetry.
On and on, and on... and then some more, and on... and ON and ON and...
There's just no end to it.
As administrators, it's like playing whack-a-mole against a thousand moles that are breeding exponentially.
We don't want to play this game any more.
There's also the very detailed page on the website detailing this as well as how to see all telemetry events that are sent in real time in the output panel and even how to print out a report of all events that get sent with their classification (code --telemetry).
I really hate it too. But it seems so be so heavily anchored in their strategy that I don't expect them to lighten up about it.
"If I've been called here, I can safely assume whatever's been done's been done wrong, otherwise I would not've been called here, cause I'm definitely not the cheapest option"
Please continue to push back against moves towards forced telemetry. Some of us work in sensitive environments, others wish for privacy. For those of us that work in sensitive environments we could simply firewall the program to stop talk back, but that will likely break many other things. Currently we have a level of trust that strikes a good balance between over the top strict security and permissive security where there are few issues because Code is trusted from a trusted domain. Forcing telemetry is likely to have Cybersecurity teams flag the app at an enterprise level and start to introduce headaches as they start to try and curb information leak.
I'm not saying this justifies dark patterns, and I have no firsthand knowledge of whether Microsoft is exclusively using this data for legitimate purposes. If it were me I'd enable it by default but make it clear and easy to disable for those who care. That said: I don't think the knee-jerk assumption that this is a wholly evil thing is justified.
As for this change, I've seen it myself, and I think it's just poor design, nothing evil. They are just refactoring telemetry control and fucked up with porting over existing preferences because it's not a 1:1 thing.
Exactly. Telemetry can be a useful like you said and should be clear to users when they are being opted into it. Especially if someone has disabled all telemetry, they should be prompted to enable it or configure it with the new settings. If you silently re-enable it on their device when they already went thru the trouble of disabling it (and not expecting the settings to change day-to-day), you'll get some knee-jerk assumptions and reactions, whether your intentions where noble or not.
No. Make it clear and easy to ENable for those who care.
That rests on some very specific assumptions; consider that, statistically, the "restore" feature of backup software is almost never used.
We've gone too long without a reckoning as software authors in this regard. You are not entitled to do whatever you wish with someone else's hardware because of a click through. Those that continue to do so will be (in my case) blacklisted from running on my network.
There are other threats and reasons, that others more versed in this can explain, but that is the one I can speak to.
But let's note that this is not the case here. You can still opt out. If they are just resetting your old settings silently, however, then this is not a nice move and it will annoy exactly the people that care.
That is only realistic on linux. Everything else us just something you've rented.
Besides, you can always go for independent vscode clone. I don't know how good it is as i haven't tried it myself. I just know it exists.
Right now, maybe. Or maybe more. Are you happy agreeing to it without being told? Being auto-enrolled without being told? What about if they add more later and don't feel the need to tell you as you didn't make the effort to opt out so must be happy with the tracking?
> Why is this so bad in comparison to any other web application or many other apps these days?
Because others do it doesn't make it right. People rail against web properties using what is seen as overly invasive telemetry/fingerprinting/profiling dark patterns too.
> but what exactly is the hidden danger here?
More information stored about you in more places, from whence it can leak further or dubious authorities can demand it be released, is a common fear in such cases for privacy campaigners and campaigners in general within the reach of certain governments.
(if people downvoting would like to let me know why, I'd be genuinely interested to know your counter point(s), otherwise I'm just going to assume that what I have said is true and you don't like it)
At that point, why not copy what people do with android? Just run a dummy "vpn" on your system that null-routes traffic going to microsoft-controlled domains or IP blocks. By no means a perfect solution for sure, but a really good one in practice.
You have remember to clear the telemetry cache and reconnect your system to microsoft to get updates from time to time.
Are they crazy? How is this legal?
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#how...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
Builds of VS Code with telemetry stripped out
Test if for yourself if you must.
I tested with Wireshark. It does respect your previous setting if it is more restrictive.
* They implemented proprietary sync protocols
* They obfuscate how 'settings' are saved - no, the settings.json is not what the editor uses and they hide stuff in the internal sqlite db they use
* Capping open versions of the product
* And finally, inserting proprietary "licensed" stuff and code that purposefully breaks if you're not licensed
You are not enrolled into the auto telemetry yet, the deprecated options are still respected for now. The new telemtry has the levels of on, crash and off. Useful if I want not to contribute my device info, but still help them with issues with the software itself.
Looks like it should be "forever" according to this comment:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/134660#issuecomme...
But telemetry is one of those things that you can never trust a company about once it's in. Especially a company with a history of both mandatory telemetry and "oops didn't mean to ;)" telemetry-related setting resets.
They're transforming the control of telemetry to a different option. The problem is that the new option doesn't default to being based on your old telemetry opt-out value, it just defaults to "on" as if you just downloaded VSC. And this leads people to reading all kinds of evil intent into it.
But it's probably not. We've all worked on big complicated products at big, slow companies, right? This is just bad design.
Either their engineers are incompetent, and accidentally chose the evil thing, or they intentionally planned it to happen this way.
vscode will still try sending data to those servers but won’t be able to reach them. Little overhead.
I was using Vscodium occasionally and despite it being very easy to use, I'm going to uninstall it now and just focus on emacs and neovim. I do not even trust vscodium since the original codebase comes from tainted origins.
