Re:Star Citizen developers intend to drop DirectX support an...
by naikrovek on Sunday March 19, 2017 @09:57PM
(#13911147)
I find that very hard to believe. Also, telemetry comes in many forms, many of which are not visible as unwanted network activity.
An application could:
* send telemetry in URL parameters when it checks for updates
* send telemetry data exactly one time after, say, an hour of use.
* send telemetry data during a time when you are already sending a lot of traffic, and send it to an amazon web service endpoint (good luck plucking that out of normal network activity based on IP data alone, when so much software communicates with most likely the same AWS endpoints.)
My point is that there is probably < 5 people on the planet who scrutinize every scheduled task, every Wireshark trace, and everything else well enough to know for certain that nothing is going on. The only people who know for sure that no telemetry is going on are those who airgap their PC from any network at all.
An application could:
* send telemetry in URL parameters when it checks for updates
* send telemetry data exactly one time after, say, an hour of use.
* send telemetry data during a time when you are already sending a lot of traffic, and send it to an amazon web service endpoint (good luck plucking that out of normal network activity based on IP data alone, when so much software communicates with most likely the same AWS endpoints.)
My point is that there is probably < 5 people on the planet who scrutinize every scheduled task, every Wireshark trace, and everything else well enough to know for certain that nothing is going on. The only people who know for sure that no telemetry is going on are those who airgap their PC from any network at all.