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owsf2000Found via slashdot. Essentially a guy compiled a barebones empty program with Microsoft's C++ compiler. just an empty main() function. Yet the compiled binary contained calls for "telemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger". This is undocumented, naturally.
Microsoft -confirmed- afterwards that telemetry calls are added, and for "Users who have a copy of VS2015 Update 2 and wish to turn off the telemetry functionality currently being compiled into their code should add notelemetry.obj to their linker command line." Microsoft claims they will be removing this in a future build (The including of telemetry to begin with.) but thecynic realist in me is convinced that this is just so they can hide it better.
1. Remember that the telemetry inclusion was completely UNDOCUMENTED.
2. Removing it requires knowledge of the undocumented "notelemetry.obj" file.
3. Microsoft kept it hidden until someone proved it existed and brought it up.
As one slashdotter commented, this is akin to a compiler inserting a backdoor.
The potential that telemetry is inside the games you purchased, if they were compiled by Visual Studio C++ by the developers I guess is very real. After all, this -was- undocumented until today, so I doubt devs would have been able to add "notelemetry.obj" to their sources.
And why the hell do you need to ADD code to REMOVE functionality.
More and more I find myself thinking if I DO try to write games on the computer, I'll be doing it on Linux only.
Microsoft -confirmed- afterwards that telemetry calls are added, and for "Users who have a copy of VS2015 Update 2 and wish to turn off the telemetry functionality currently being compiled into their code should add notelemetry.obj to their linker command line." Microsoft claims they will be removing this in a future build (The including of telemetry to begin with.) but the
1. Remember that the telemetry inclusion was completely UNDOCUMENTED.
2. Removing it requires knowledge of the undocumented "notelemetry.obj" file.
3. Microsoft kept it hidden until someone proved it existed and brought it up.
As one slashdotter commented, this is akin to a compiler inserting a backdoor.
The potential that telemetry is inside the games you purchased, if they were compiled by Visual Studio C++ by the developers I guess is very real. After all, this -was- undocumented until today, so I doubt devs would have been able to add "notelemetry.obj" to their sources.
And why the hell do you need to ADD code to REMOVE functionality.
More and more I find myself thinking if I DO try to write games on the computer, I'll be doing it on Linux only.
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Date: 2016-06-10 07:20 pm (UTC)You have to trust mojang/microsoft that when you turn it off that it's truly off though, and that the list of variables it shows you as what it's reporting are truly the only things it's reporting. For now I am, but I wouldn't doubt it if someone managed to prove it's not doing what it says it's doing. I'll make the call to uninstall minecraft at that point. Probably giving mojang too much faith with this, but I'll let them burn their own boat.
The question is if microsoft would risk burning down the 2 billion dollar game they bought with bad karma before it's able to pay itself back. I'm sure after they've pulled in 2 billion dollars of profit off the game in sales (which is going to take a while) they might be more willing to burn it alongside their OS and developer karma.