Their getting started instructions [0] are all just terminal commands too, and even that doesn't mention Mac once.
Not that it is not annoying, it is, but that's pretty common with Mac-only software in my experience.
On the rare occasion it is truly just win, it's usually made clear far more than macos only.
We should make it even more transparent what we collect. You can see it here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...
Re: big business, we're still pretty small, but it's true that we are trying to build a business around the command-line. I get that's controversial and it's not something that exists and that the terminal is a super-sensitive low level tool.
We will never ever build a business around terminal data, and to be super explicit, we are 100% not collecting any command inputs or outputs.
The business that we want to build is around making a terminal (or a platform for text based apps) that grows because it makes individuals and teams a lot more productive on the command line.
I've there's one thing I've taken away from this ShowHN so far is that there is a lot of well-founded concern about the terminal and user data and that we need to do a better job on this issue.
Given that, it's probably the case that the only options are to either be fully open source or to make a fully offline mode an option.
In any case, I think the concept for your product is excellent—it's been mind-boggling to me that something along these lines wasn't tackled years ago, so I look forward to your guys' future success, hopefully moving the state of terminal interaction into the modern era.
It's not just that the level of trust is very low. I shouldn't need to place any trust in the developers of my terminal at all. If I can't know for a fact that it's not acting against my interests, then I'll pass. I already have such a big selection of fully open-source terminals available. Why would I even consider taking any king of risk with this one?
My advice here would be to simply make telemetry opt-in during the beta period. I’m typically pretty liberal about opting in to telemetry (particularly when the extent of which is documented), but obviously a lot of your users will not be. Your desire to accelerate your progress seems to conflate with the needs of your target demo, and I think this warrants adjustment.
Look at the recent logging fiasco for an example.
A useful terminal cannot be prevented from contacting remote hosts.
Warp could certainly promise not to include any phone-home functionality in their code, but unless it's open-source and everything is audited, it could easily call the host system's HTTP client and still phone home.
Is this true? This sounds wrong to me but I don't know the inner workings of terminals. The terminal just executes programs and handles pipes it seems. A terminal can be completely walled from the internet, and when you execute something from it, say, curl, then curl has it's own memory space and access layer outside the terminal, and just has it's stdio wired to the terminal.
As I said in my comment, even if you "wall" the terminal off from the internet, if it can make system calls on behalf of the user, it can still access the internet.
If a terminal has sufficient access to the host system to call `curl https://www.google.com` on behalf of the user, then it can call it without any user input.
There is nothing on the host machine that can authenticate system calls coming from the terminal application as "user-initiated" or not. This is similar to the warning that "you can't trust the client"[1].
1. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/105389/dont-tru...
This is a human problem, not a software one. Your terminal is as trustworthy as its creators. It cannot be locked down to prevent telemetry and still be a useful terminal. That was my original point and it is still true.
No one should use a for-profit terminal emulator, especially one created by a VC-backed startup, full stop.
they actually listen to our feedback, remove forced telemetry, remove sign-in in the next release, then i'd be more happy to give their product another chance
although no guarantee they'll not turn evil at some point in the future...
If a company is committed to never spying, then they'd have no problem making such terms contractually binding on their end. Companies that say they're against spying, but leave the option to collect their users' data open for the future, aren't really committed to not spying.
But yeah, terminals are very sensitive environments, opt-in should be a default even at launch.
Is this really the case? It seems that to find mistakes in software for various interaction patterns, truly exhaustive automated tests would likely work far better by various measures (coverage, reliability, reproducibility, reusability etc.) and at the same time do not have the extreme downside of privacy invasion. For example, see a section from the Age of Empires Post Mortem https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/the-game-developer-archives... :
"8. We didn’t take enough advantage of automated testing. In the final weeks of development, we set up the game to automatically play up to eight computers against each other. Additionally, a second computer containing the development platform and debugger could monitor each computer that took part. These games, while randomly generated, were logged so that if anything happened, we could reproduce the exact game over and over until we isolated the problem. The games themselves were allowed to run at an accelerated speed and were left running overnight. This was a great success and helped us in isolating very hard to reproduce problems. Our failure was in not doing this earlier in development; it could have saved us a great deal of time and effort. All of our future production plans now include automated testing from Day One."
Always-on metrics are massively higher quality data. They don't collect the same kind of data in many cases, but they can reveal a lot of things that never get reported. They also don't suffer from the well-established pattern of people not accurately reporting their own behavior when asked / polled (stronger when asking about future behavior, but it applies in all cases).
Automated Error reporting does has it uses.
You are not entitled to access my machine, and that shouldn't be casually dismissed with "don't worry, we're not doing anything bad." You're creating potential vulnerabilities, and by implementing identifiable patterns, reducing the security of your users.
You shouldn't spy on people, and when you do, it's wrong. Remotely inspecting people's behavior is spying.
Your software doesn't need to phone home. It doesn't need automatic updates. You don't need to spy on people to develop good software. That's toxic nonsense.
- be opt-in
- provide an easy to read & access log which can be reviewed by the user at any point
- never collect unnecessary information 'just because' it might be useful in the future
- should provide a very good detailed analysis of any claims to anonymity
If something doesn't even fulfil the first criterion, it's probably violating all the others too.
Case studies, focus groups, surveys and interviews are great ways to determine usage patterns and problems with products and services. Of course, you'd need to pay users to participate in them, and then you need to pay expensive employees to conduct, collect and analyze the results. Spying is cheaper than doing any of that.
I agree both that telemetry is useful and that there's not necessarily a place for it in the tool I use to manage my workstation and hundreds of servers. Perhaps I'd opt in to a middle ground, that is collect telemetry locally into a support file I can review, evaluate, and potentially redact before submission.
Then why is the telemetry-encrusted modern Windows a usability fail, even compared to past versions of Windows which relied on extensive in-house user testing?
That's my theory anyway.
As evidence of this, I offer: the vast majority of all human behavior over literally all time.
I don't personally see any reason to swap terminal with telemetry. One of my worst fears that some day I am forced to.
Then why would anybody bother to invest in their next series?
Which library was/is doing this? Would like to avoid it.
EDIT: To be fair there is some transparency in the original post. I was looking through the landing page for it (where it is not mentioned). Also, imho it should still be opt-in even for beta. Not everyone is going to read the wall of text to parse out the buried note on telemetry