General Muse Group shitshow / Audacity pull request to introduce telemetry

[Disappointed Kenny]

Yes, you need pretty graphs to keep clueless business types from fucking your software into the dirt. If an uppity bean counter starts chimping about the money it costs to support XYZ, you need to show them a pretty graph that justifies XYZ in a language they understand. If you don't then they'll start slashing critical features while their fellow retards congratulate them for their business acumen.

I'd wager this is the reason that every single one of your favorite softwares goes to shit suddenly and without warning.

Mild powerlevel: I kept getting pestered to pull an analytics report for one of the websites I was responsible for, or the project would lose its funding. Despite 10 concurrent users on a website per day, I showed them a graph of those 10 users and they were satisfied to give the project its full budget.

Business executives are fucking retarded.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Who the fuck even updates their Audacity? Haven't updated it since 2016 because there's really nothing else that warrants an update?

Any form of telemetry is definitely just going to be sold, there's no other reason why audacity would be using user data for their own software development

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

What's up with usage statistics anyway?
Has this ever had any practical use at all and improved anything?

At best someone feeds it to a program to make a pretty graph out of it.

Probably monetary gain. Just another means of software on its last legs providing some level of utility. Just install spyware and start data harvesting the people who update it and don't know.

 

[gooseberry-picker]

The annoying things about this PR are them vendoring dependencies and relying on Google. I like that the chimp out is going to make this all optional at build-time now.

I guess on the plus side we can at least be glad that people do give a shit about Audacity.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

The annoying things about this PR are them vendoring dependencies and relying on Google. I like that the chimp out is going to make this all optional at build-time now.

I guess on the plus side we can at least be glad that people do give a shit about Audacity.

People give a shit we're they'll fork Audacity and just remove the spyware. The beauty of FOSS.

 

[Kosher Dill]

People give a shit we're they'll fork Audacity and just remove the spyware. The beauty of FOSS.

Serious question: how often does that actually work? LibreOffice is the only example I can think of where people successfully forked a major FOSS project that went bad.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Serious question: how often does that actually work? LibreOffice is the only example I can think of where people successfully forked a major FOSS project that went bad.

If it's on Github, just fork it, go through the code to find spooky spyware elements (it's pretty obvious in a software application about audio), and then remove it, build it again and release it as OpenAudacity or something along those lines. I might even give it a crack myself if I have time.

I think I found the passive statement about it having spyware now

 

[Kosher Dill]

If it's on Github, just fork it

Well yes, I'm not questioning whether it is technically possible. Just if it's realistic to expect people (both users and developers) to migrate in large numbers from a big-name project to a fork, or failing that, for the fork to be maintained long-term.

By pure coincidence, Glimpse (the fork of GIMP that does nothing but change the "offensive" name) closed up shop just today.

A Project On Hiatus | Glimpse

glimpse-editor.org

I suppose Iceweasel held on for a decade, along similar lines.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

Well yes, I'm not questioning whether it is technically possible. Just if it's realistic to expect people (both users and developers) to migrate in large numbers from a big-name project to a fork, or failing that, for the fork to be maintained long-term.

By pure coincidence, Glimpse (the fork of GIMP that does nothing but change the "offensive" name) closed up shop just today.

A Project On Hiatus | Glimpse

glimpse-editor.org

I suppose Iceweasel held on for a decade, along similar lines.

I think it depends on how bad it is. If people really aren't happy with how Audacity implements this (and if this sets a precedent for other bad shit down the track), then yes there will be a dedicated fork for it.

Otherwise some autist will just fork it, delete all that shit and then merge new changes and keep the telemetry out.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Serious question: how often does that actually work? LibreOffice is the only example I can think of where people successfully forked a major FOSS project that went bad.

Part of the reason Libreoffice worked was because the original project that it was forked from had such massive and total defection because it had been a flawed project for several years anyway. Openoffice.org was so long in the tooth and corporately mismanaged that a fork would have been justified earlier than one appeared.

 

[VIPPER?]

just remove the analytics code and build it yourself?

Alternatively, why not just build or find an old version? It's not even like it's a web browser or something for security, isn't Audacity just VirtualDub for .wav files?

 

[Pee Cola]

Audacity has gone from bad to worse. (archive)

From the updated Audacity privacy policy: (archive)

 

[HumanHive]

FOSS is meaningless if some corporate entity can ignore all feedback with a smile and say “you’ll love our next update!”

 

[awoo]

Serious question: how often does that actually work? LibreOffice is the only example I can think of where people successfully forked a major FOSS project that went bad.

Off the top of my head I can think of TexStudio forked from TexMaker and Pale Moon forked from original versions of Firefox, though the TeX softwares appear to be about equal in popularity and Firefox is still much more popular.

https://thenewstack.io/may-fork-short-history-open-source-forks/ has a lot more. Aside from the most obvious LibreOffice, they also mention MariaDB and Apache server itself was a fork.


On topic: like I said earlier, what will likely happen is distros will maintain patches that remove the nonsense, or just never update. Distro maintainers are not stupid and they are not afraid of maintaining downstream patches to get specific behavior. Windows and Mac users will just have to install old versions like uTorrent (although I recommend not using that and something else like Deluge or Transmission)

Old article on the subject

The Audacity: Audio tool finds new and exciting ways to annoy contributors with a Contributor License Agreement

Is that a tuning Fork we hear?

www.theregister.com

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Audacity has gone from bad to worse. (archive)

From the updated Audacity privacy policy: (archive)

View attachment 2317373View attachment 2317374

HASHED IP ADDRESS? FUCKING HASHED IP ADDRESS?

Is there even one.. single... hash collision across the IP address space for any modern hashing algorithm? Let alone MD5 which is what they are probably using?

I would work it out by hashing every single possible IP address, but that would probably take a minute on a decade old Macbook Air.
(Yes I'm aware they could, in theory, be salting these, that's why I'm talking in terms of generating a new rainbow table- any retard can already download one for IPv4).

Marg bar Audacity.

Part of the reason Libreoffice worked was because the original project that it was forked from had such massive and total defection because it had been a flawed project for several years anyway. Openoffice.org was so long in the tooth and corporately mismanaged that a fork would have been justified earlier than one appeared.

A sad fact. If Sun had just... reviewed and accepted community patches... we would now be living in a world where Oracle OpenOffice was being dual-licensed to corporations right now.

 

[Slav Power]

FOSS is meaningless if some corporate entity can ignore all feedback with a smile and say “you’ll love our next update!”

Thankfully FOSS allows for people to simply make their own, better version of the fucked up software, with blackjack and hookers.

 

[419]

Audacity has gone from bad to worse. (archive)

From the updated Audacity privacy policy: (archive)

View attachment 2317373View attachment 2317374

This is the best bit.

1. Minors
   1. The App we provide is not intended for individuals below the age of 13. If you are under 13 years old, please do not use the App.

I'm aware this is probably to do with ethical concerns about data collection of minors but the fact that they needed to elaborate this as if an audio-editing program was somehow too "naughty" to be used by kids is at least a little fucking funny.

 

[Govt. Shitposting Machine]

This is the best bit.

I'm aware this is probably to do with ethical concerns about data collection of minors but the fact that they needed to elaborate this as if an audio-editing program was somehow too "naughty" to be used by kids is at least a little fucking funny.

It's because of COPPA iirc, it's easier to tell kids to just fuck off instead of going through the effort to get parental permission and whatnot.
Wonder how schools will handle this, imagine trying to teach young ones about audio editing but Musescore/Audacity team waggles its fingers and tells you to fuck off.

 

[HumanHive]

This is the best bit.

I'm aware this is probably to do with ethical concerns about data collection of minors but the fact that they needed to elaborate this as if an audio-editing program was somehow too "naughty" to be used by kids is at least a little fucking funny.

Lawyers are retards. News at 11.

 

[419]

In other news, a fork effort has already popped up. They're also already up in arms about the fact that /g/ has caught onto the project.