[HN Gopher] Minecraft to add telemetry
___________________________________________________________________
Minecraft to add telemetry
Author : wylie39
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-09-30 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minecraft.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minecraft.net)
| moogly wrote:
| Not related to telemetry, but I checked out Minecraft about less
| than a year ago for the first time in about 10 years (I had to
| dig out my old account details from an ancient email and migrate
| my account through some strange form) and spent a week playing it
| until I had enough, and I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how
| little has been added to the game during those 10 years.
|
| Sure, the fact that they have two divergent, separate games and
| are completely unable to move over to the C++ codebase and sunset
| the Java version due to the lack of modding (I remember the
| modding community screaming about needing a proper modding API
| back in the olden days, and Mojang hiring some of the Bukkit team
| back in 2012 to develop it, and it never came to fruition, still
| to this day), makes them having to do twice the work implementing
| stuff, but that's at least parallelizable work. I doubt the same
| people work on both codebases?
|
| I feel I need to sit down with someone who's working at Mojang
| and ask wtf is going on over there because it could be
| fascinating.
| Freskis wrote:
| The amount of feature additions in the last 10 years has been
| enormous.
|
| Is it possible you were playing an old "world" which doesn't
| have the latest features? Or were playing an older version
| (which is supported in the latest launcher)?
| moogly wrote:
| No, I played a fresh game. Latest version at the time (1.16.3
| & 1.16.4). Checked a wiki whilst playing so to make sure I
| wasn't missing major new stuff.
|
| I can't agree that the additions have been "enormous". Not
| for 10 years. And if you've seen one mineshaft or stronghold
| or underwater temple, you've seen them all. No variation.
|
| There's of course something to be said about staying true to
| the purity of the gameplay experience (like, say, DOTA2, but
| the depth and replayability there is in strategy, not
| content), but that feels like the wrong approach to a game
| that's in a large part about exploring like Minecraft.
| crorella wrote:
| Telemetry per se is not a bad thing when you make it with privacy
| at the center of it. If you offer users the chance to opt-in/opt-
| out of logging and then _REALLY_ respect that decision by first)
| not generating data when the user does not want to and second)
| not using the data for purposes the user does not sign up for (in
| downstream, analytics mostly)
|
| then telemetry can actually be beneficial to keep improving your
| product and features.
| h54545nb wrote:
| Well I was going to re-install and check out new updates but I
| guess not anymore. I don't care how helpful it is, if there is no
| details on the exact specification of what data is shared and no
| way to disable it, I won't support the product.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| The details are in the link?
|
| Contains following information: launcher identifier user
| identitifer (XUID) client session id (changes on restart) world
| session id (changes per world load, to be reused for later
| events) game version operating system name and version Java
| runtime version if client or server is modded (same information
| as on crash logs) server type (single player, Realms or other)
| game mode
| rozab wrote:
| If the reasons they give for this were honest, you'd think their
| time would be better spent building the kind of extremely basic
| integration tests that would detect if, say, their world
| generation broke making the game unwinnable.
|
| https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-236618
|
| Inflammatory zingers aside, I don't mind telemetry in a product
| like this and I'm sure I'd want it if I were working on it. But
| I'd want automated tests first. Factorio's approach seems
| enlightened, but very rare in the industry.
| alexander-litty wrote:
| Not a great example. This bug was in one of the weekly snapshot
| releases, which regularly and knowingly have some unplayable
| element to them.
| diegoperini wrote:
| No amount of integration tests can replicate millions of
| players, organically interacting with a video game. The state
| space is too large for that.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Yeah I thought so too, but reading the ticket they linked it
| looks like in a specific version of Minecraft, strongholds
| we're not being generated at all?
|
| I only recently started playing Minecraft again after years.
| Last time I played it, The End did not exist yet in
| Minecraft. Back then we used to joke about "winning
| Minecraft". Also, lava used to be an infinite resource if you
| built a cross and filled each corner with lava, you could
| then take infinite lava out from the middle which was neat.
| But they decided to remove that for some reason.
|
| Anyway, bugs happen and I think the GP is wrong to suggest
| that telemetry is not helpful. Being able to see how people
| actually use the software is how Microsoft has done it since
| many many years AFAIK. And it helps Microsoft to develop
| better software.
|
| There are many things I don't like about Microsoft and I
| don't use their Windows operating system almost at all. But I
| think they still got a lot right about how to develop
| software.
| reificator wrote:
| > _Yeah I thought so too, but reading the ticket they
| linked it looks like in a specific version of Minecraft,
| strongholds we're not being generated at all?_
|
| That "specific version of Minecraft" being a weekly
| development snapshot and not a point release, to be clear.
| vkoskiv wrote:
| The phrase "...to better understand our [users] and to improve
| their experience..."
|
| always rings alarm bells in my head. It's corporate lingo for "We
| want to increase profits by selling your private data for as long
| as we can get away with it."
| bastardoperator wrote:
| This guy knows how to mine diamonds!
| pyr0hu wrote:
| What private data would you get by tracking minecraft players?
| sli wrote:
| First one that immediately comes to mind is knowing when a
| person has leisure time. Since email is also known, this gets
| added to whatever body of data that's been collected on the
| person with that email. You can already make some inferences
| about a person just based on when they have leisure time,
| before you even add it to the existing body of data.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's very generic phrasing, and some products _do_ hide
| nefarious behaviour behind it, but it 's also just an accurate
| description of the most innocent, straightforward use of
| telemetry out there. I, for one, can't think of a way to
| monetise Firebase stack traces.
|
| This is a game, so let's use other games as examples. Here's
| two pretty damn good talks from GDC about what the value
| telemetry brings to the table (the StS one goes into a whole
| bunch of other stuff that's sort of irrelevant but also serves
| to motivate the telemetry topic):
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urx7WQE6NY0 *
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rqfbvnO_H0
| supperburg wrote:
| I really want to see a Minecraft that's written in a fast
| language and also takes advantage of the huge amounts of storage
| and memory that we have now. The main problem with Minecraft is
| that you can see the end of the blocks even on high settings.
| Would also be cool to see slightly smaller blocks
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Here you go https://www.minetest.net/
| rndinternetguy wrote:
| They did that - it's called Minecraft Bedrock and is written in
| c#. The problem is that it's not a 1 to 1 copy of Java edition
| and much of the functionality differs, so most PC players
| prefer the Java edition as it reflects the original gameplay.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Far more importantly than "original gameplay" although there
| are deviations that would matter enormously for e.g. speed
| running, you can't mod Bedrock.
|
| I don't actually play vanilla (unmodified) PC Minecraft more
| than perhaps a few minutes every year to see what's new or
| test something in the vanilla program.
|
| But I spent hours every month playing packs like Compact
| Claustrophobia (a pack where you spend all except the last
| section of the "plot" trapped inside Compact Machines, pocket
| universes which don't exist in the vanilla game at all but
| are fairly popular in modding). Or say Seaopolis which starts
| out in a vast world-covering ocean but eventually allows you
| to do space travel.
|
| Mojang and then Microsoft did some basic work to enable this,
| but a huge part of it comes from the core being Java, and so
| once modding is allowed it's possible to reach inside an
| object and replace parts of the game wholesale. And from the
| contingent popularity and huge community that took this and
| really ran with it.
|
| Modding enables people to focus on the type of play they most
| enjoy. If you wish the game had more tricky combat and needed
| survival skills, you can have that. If you'd rather become a
| God-like being and form the world as it should be, you can
| have that. If you like problem solving, you can spend all
| your time building complicated machines to solve increasingly
| dubious problems (e.g. don't think "automatically farm
| carrots" think "automatically farm dragon eggs").
| xahrepap wrote:
| it's actually C++. And it's the same codebase for all the
| consoles/mobile devices
|
| https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft
|
| > This version is programmed in C++ and is available for a
| multitude of platforms including iOS, Android, VR, Xbox One,
| and Nintendo Switch. Since the Bedrock engine is a full
| rebuild different from the Java Edition, there is a
| noticeable difference between Bedrock and Java edition.
| vitejose wrote:
| I'm sure there are real performance improvements by moving
| to C++, but at the same time, I cannot believe how long
| this list of differences is.
|
| https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Official_pages/Parity_iss
| u...
|
| It also doesn't help that the two versions are separate
| purchases.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > It also doesn't help that the two versions are separate
| purchases.
|
| Didn't bedrock edition come for free with windows 10? I
| have it but I am sure I never paid for it.
| tenryuu wrote:
| For a long period of time, you got a free Windows key for
| it if you owned a Java license. I do not believe they are
| continuing this promotion
| belval wrote:
| Eh Minecraft is a video game, I just don't see the privacy risk
| with "typical" Windows-level telemetry happening there.
|
| At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps
| them fix real issues too, they're not monetizing their players
| directly with it.
| oneplane wrote:
| I don't think what type of application it is determines if a
| person has a right to their privacy if they want it. Same goes
| for data, we don't have to "accept" anything.
|
| On the other hand, if it wasn't Microsoft's brand being
| connected to this and it wasn't called telemetry but "Automatic
| Bug Report Sharing" nobody would make a peep.
|
| The same goes for the kind of data or application: if people
| know what type of data would be shared and what it would look
| like, they might indeed understand that this isn't some
| nefarious profiling but just normal software improvement. If
| you are a developer, bug reports are nearly useless unless it's
| super repeatable with normal conditions and a few clearly
| defined steps... or if there is a useful automatic reporting
| system in place.
|
| But none of that reduces someone's expectation of privacy or
| acceptance of data sharing.
| lmilcin wrote:
| But the explanation just does not satisfy me.
|
| I mean, world building is an expensive but actually pretty
| simple, predictable operation. If they want to see how it
| performs on slower computer they don't need to get telemetry,
| just actually run it on slower hardware.
| Thaxll wrote:
| As if all problems are reproducable at will on all the
| different set of software / hardware out there ...
| genewitch wrote:
| In theory it ought to be, but since drivers are generally
| closed source we actually have to test on everything.
| Thaxll wrote:
| What I meant is that you don't know the problem until you
| had it, out of the millions of players you need feedback
| that something is not working properly, reports /
| telemetry is a must have. Most serious online games have
| such mechanism.
| ginko wrote:
| > Eh Minecraft is a video game, I just don't see the privacy
| risk with "typical" Windows-level telemetry happening there.
|
| But then Minecraft is a video game. Why do they need to spy on
| their customers?
| hulitu wrote:
| It did not helped them fix problems in Teams, Windows and
| Office 365. Why do you think Minecraft will be different.
| mholm wrote:
| Citation needed. Not every bug will be solved by telemetry,
| but that doesn't mean we wouldn't be in a very different
| state without it.
| zh3 wrote:
| Minecraft is a game played mostly by kids (minors). Tracking
| their behaviour, finding out what they try (even if just
| looking for ways to game the system) is pretty useful info.
| falcolas wrote:
| > they're not monetizing their players directly with it
|
| How do you know? Did they pinkie swear on it? Did they add any
| kind of T&C around their use of Telemetry specifically?
|
| Telemetry that can be used to identify frequently used game
| functionality could equally be used to identify game
| functionality that can be monetized. Identifying how a user
| dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to
| prevent those common deaths.
| Zandikar wrote:
| Precisely. Another commenter said they were shocked to see
| this community have a negative reaction to telemetry in this
| instance (and/or generally), and this is why: For-Profit
| corporations have routinely and repeatedly demonstrated that
| they should _never_ be given the benefit of the doubt in this
| area. The developers and engineers in charge of game balance
| or mechanics may be people we can intellectually relate to
| and understand the positive value of telemetry, but we more
| than most should also be aware of how those same people have
| management to answer to who see something to be abused to
| improve monetization.
|
| It _can_ be a good thing, yes. Why on earth would anyone
| _assume_ it would be used and only used in positive, privacy
| respecting ways in this day and age?
| filoleg wrote:
| >Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify
| items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.
|
| Just as commonly, it is done to identify bugs and issues,
| tweak the game balance to get it to a better state, or to see
| which things players like to do (as opposed to what they say
| on forums and in focus groups) in order to provide more of
| similar features.
|
| It is no different from engagement logging in a lot of
| applications. It is far from always being done for the
| purpose of monetization. If my business application has a lot
| of users stuck on a particular screen for prolonged periods
| of time due to the UX being confusing, I would want to know
| about it and address it. A lot of times it is hard to gauge
| how bad it is, because users might just tolerate it if it is
| ok, or maybe it is something users attribute to their own
| fault (i.e., they might feel it is just them being confused
| about it, not that the UX is confusing for everyone).
| Engagement logging would help me identify that problem and
| pinpoint it very fast.
|
| >How do you know [they are not using it for monetizing]?
|
| How do you know they are? I am more surprised they didn't
| have that type of telemetry already for a while, because
| that's one of the most common ways to identify pain-points in
| the gameplay balancing, which features might need more
| attention/rework, identifying potentially very tricky to
| catch bugs, and come up with ideas for new feature ideas that
| users might like based on actual data (as opposed to hearsay
| and public feedback, which can get significantly skewed by
| selection bias and other factors).
| slg wrote:
| >At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps
| them fix real issues too
|
| It is strange that this community of all communities has such a
| resistance to this idea. Software developers should know better
| than anyone how difficult it is to identify and fix vague
| software problems without having specific details about the
| problem. Yes, there is a negotiation between the value of
| telemetry and privacy and often too much privacy is sacrificed.
| But I am always surprised to hear developers say all telemetry
| is bad.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It is strange that this community of all communities has
| such a resistance to this idea.
|
| I don't think many people here have any resistance to this.
| It's simply true. I think a lot of people, though, think that
| benefit isn't sufficient to overcome the drawbacks.
| oehpr wrote:
| Because the visual difference between abusive telemetry and
| benign or useful telemetry is 0. Same with disclosures.
|
| And we are a very abused culture sitting in the middle of
| what I hope is peak surveillance capitalism.
|
| Beat someone with a stick enough, and when you go to scratch
| your back and they flinch, it's not sensible to deride them
| for being irrational.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive
| software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal
| life. But I also write business software where the
| expectation of privacy is already moot.
|
| Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in
| heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers
| don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many
| GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps,
| incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune
| game balance.
|
| There are numerous places where telemetry is completely
| inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer
| should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted.
| (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some
| setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at
| 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I
| wish other operating systems could follow that example)
| ashton314 wrote:
| > freebsd on a new server
|
| It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned
| from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a
| typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that,
| you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows
| what. (Just my small experience.)
| dandotway wrote:
| This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL:
| $ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY
| STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 3.5 0.0
| 8944 332 ? Ssl 11:38 0:00 /init root
| 7 0.0 0.0 8944 228 tty1 Ss 11:38 0:00 /init
| dando 8 1.7 0.0 16804 3396 tty1 S 11:38
| 0:00 -bash dando 32 0.0 0.0 17392 1916
| tty1 R 11:38 0:00 ps aux
|
| A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is
| to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the
| equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows
| what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in
| Windows Task Manager.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Tip: If a process is a service-host, run `tasklist /svc`
| and that way you can actually _know_ what 's going on in
| each process.
| gtirloni wrote:
| If you install a server distro, the number of default
| processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and
| you'll get the same huge list of processes.
| cesarb wrote:
| > If you install a server distro, the number of default
| processes is pretty minimal.
|
| It depends on which processes. If you include kernel
| threads (which show as processes), the number of
| processes can get pretty huge, especially on many-core
| servers (several of these kernel threads are per-core).
|
| I don't know whether on FreeBSD kernel threads show up as
| separate processes; if they don't, it might explain part
| of the difference.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Not so sure about that, my last fresh install of Ubuntu
| Server (admittedly like 4-5 years ago now) had several
| cores hovering in the 20-30% range while idle and nothing
| was installed on the server yet. "Ooop, guess I'm going
| back to debian"
| koolba wrote:
| It's the difference between always sending something and a
| pop up asking if you want to send a bug report.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| How about performance issues and silent errors? Finding
| areas that need to me optimized because a lot of users have
| subtle issues kinda needs passive data collection.
|
| As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO.
|
| As long as users give informed consent, then it's
| acceptable.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yup. A previous company I worked at used assert calls in
| the code. In a debug build of the firmware, if an assert
| failed, it would crash the device and on the display it
| would show the file and line number of the assert call.
| In production firmware, it would silently ignore it, and
| if you had opted in to sending usage data, it would phone
| home and report the failed assert, though I don't know
| what extra data was included.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The key still being "if you had opted in".
| conradev wrote:
| I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software
| better.
|
| Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps
| taken to anonymize the data (either provably using
| Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means),
| I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP,
| though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't
| know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the
| line for some people. Even if the project promises to not log
| them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The problem with explanations and promises is that there's
| a lot of bad water that has flowed under those bridges.
| They amount to just saying "trust me".
|
| As a dev, telemetry makes me nervous because so many
| projects rely on it too heavily and make bad design
| decisions because the telemetry blinds them.
| conradev wrote:
| Absolutely. There are steps that software can take to
| build this trust, though, like
|
| - Have a screen that shows all telemetry that is going to
| be or has been sent
|
| - Ask for permission to send any telemetry, or certain
| types of telemetry (i.e. crash reports)
|
| - Publicly share the collected telemetry.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I completely agree. However, Microsoft has demonstrated
| user-hostile tactics in the telemetry field so people don't
| feel inclined to trust them.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making
| software better.
|
| Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved
| by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of
| change or modernism does not count.
|
| Thank you.
| MikusR wrote:
| Office.
| conradev wrote:
| The word "telemetry" can mean a lot more than "detailed
| usage data to inform design decisions"
|
| I'm talking extremely basic things, like, what are the
| most popular crashes in the app? Which did I introduce in
| the most recent version? Why is there an increase in end
| to end latency in fetching data from the server? Stuff
| that would fall under "bug fixes and improvements" that
| you would likely not notice.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Windows.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Windows went downhill fast since introduction of
| telemetry.
| ginko wrote:
| Windows has been getting worse for the last 3 or so
| generations of Windows.
| falcolas wrote:
| How? I mean, in what way, and in response to which
| metrics?
| hulitu wrote:
| You mean that calc.exe opening in 3 seconds is better
| than instantly. Or dissapearing ribbon and title bar on
| windows in a multimonitor setup is better than before. Or
| the new designed shutdown menu.Or the white fonts on
| light background. Or dissapearing scrollbars because
| someone thought that this is a good idea. Or the new save
| dialog when you need 3 clicks just to be able to select
| the folder where you want to save.
| delroth wrote:
| We introduced some opt-in telemetry in dolphin-emu.org
| several years ago. I remember several times we discovered
| things we would likely have completely missed otherwise:
|
| - We found out by looking at the distribution of software
| version that we had a strong holdout on one specific
| revision. It turns out we had a regression in a niche
| feature which was very important to a sub-community of
| our users, and users were basically telling each other to
| just use that old version. No bug report was filed until
| we found out via analytics and asked.
|
| - We have a "game quirks" mechanism where the emulator
| reports weird edge cases that happen very rarely. Current
| list: https://github.com/dolphin-
| emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Co..., example usage:
| https://github.com/dolphin-
| emu/dolphin/blob/ffdc8538a162b1ca... . We used this to
| find games that use currently unimplemented or stubbed
| features.
|
| - The list of popular games being played on the emulator
| was extremely surprising because it turns out there's a
| huge disconnect in what most NA/EU players are playing
| and what JP players are playing. This led to us adding a
| bunch of new games to the list we regularly test for
| performance and stability regressions. Would you have
| guessed that Inazuma Eleven GO: Strikers 2013 is in the
| top10 of emulated games on Dolphin?
| skeaker wrote:
| This is a fascinating answer that has persuaded me to
| your side. I recall opting out of Dolphin telemetry
| because I simply couldn't be bothered to check what would
| be sent, but seeing not only examples of what data is
| sent but also how it's used in such a positive way will
| definitely have me turning the telemetry on next time I
| go to use it.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It helps that when you have a front row seat at a butcher's
| house, you become somewhat averse to eating meat as part of
| your regular diet. From that perspective, it is really not
| that surprising.
| bialpio wrote:
| I like this analogy, let's run with it even further! Can
| the aversion be caused by watching butchers that kill
| animals in an inhumane way, in a dirty shed?
|
| (i.e. if you observe telemetry data being abused at the
| company you work for and that is tolerated, you'll be wary
| of any telemetry?)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There are at least two distinct issues here this community is
| concerned about:
|
| 1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide
| informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical
| point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should
| know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically
| (especially if they took VC funding).
|
| 2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular
| in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's
| the practice of making decisions through divination from data
| collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of
| other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your
| users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This
| leads to software being optimized in questionable directions
| - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies
| an increased chance the software will become worse over time.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide
| informed consent (opt-in) for it.
|
| And if the only way to opt out is not use the product.
| Especially after they bought it.
| cylon13 wrote:
| Worse in a really insidious way too. Optimizing based on
| engagement for instance could be maxxing the amount of time
| people spend using a service, while minning unseen
| variables people care about like their emotional state
| while engaged. It's sort of an inevitable thing that
| optimizers do to things they don't measure, and it's an
| extremely difficult problem to put everything people care
| about into the equation. Like for instance, think of how
| horrible a polynomial fit gets for a function just outside
| the window you are fitting as you add more terms.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > But last week, Facebook revealed that it had
| manipulated the news feeds of over half a million
| randomly selected users to change the number of positive
| and negative posts they saw. It was part of a
| psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread
| on social media.
|
| Doing such a study would be the first step in optimizing
| for a good emotional state. But it (quite understandably)
| led to an outcry which stopped it dead in its tracks.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-
| tinke...
| sneak wrote:
| Windows-level telemetry is not "typical"; it includes a dozen
| or more different spy subsystems. Most spyware apps only
| include 1-3.
|
| If you are judging based on Windows as a benchmark, almost all
| software is going to come in as acceptable.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Well Windows is a little bigger than most apps, wouldn't you
| say?
| belval wrote:
| I just meant to say that wherever the line is, I don't think
| Minecraft telemetry is anything to get angry about.
| rnd0 wrote:
| ha ha ha I came here to troll -or at least point out tongue-in-
| cheek the same thing.
|
| But seriously though, it's not on the same level as, say
| -visual studio code sending back telemetry which includes
| potentially secret code or anything. Or Defenders willy-nilly
| sending "samples" back to the mothership for analysis.
|
| I sincerely don't mind it if a game sends this info back, I
| think it's actually a _good_ use of Telemetry.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps
| them fix real issues too, they're not monetizing their players
| directly with it.
|
| What do we know about that?
|
| Microsoft have long lost the benefit of doubt with their shady
| data collection practices.
| the-dude wrote:
| What kind of evil things have they done with the data?
| Genuinely curious.
| [deleted]
| bobmaxup wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_10#Priva
| c...
| ginko wrote:
| They're literally Microsoft. They've used up their lifetime
| supply of goodwill in the 90s.
| II2II wrote:
| The problem is an irrational degree of distrust in the industry
| as a whole.
|
| It's not that I blame those who distrust any form of telemetry.
| Many companies are eager to harvest as much personal
| information as possible. Depending upon one's definition of
| personal information, some of the data acquired by telemetry
| can be used for that purpose. In many cases the data collection
| process is deliberately opaque. In the remaining cases, very
| few people have the ability to verify that what is actually
| sent reflects what they are told is sent. That's before
| factoring in Microsoft's involvement here, since they have a
| negative reputation in some circles due to their past business
| practices.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think the software industry as a whole has earned a high
| degree of distrust on these issues. It's not irrational.
| yuuta wrote:
| The key problem is that Mojang does not allow users to disable
| it.
| zimmund wrote:
| In previous versions it was enough with snooperEnabled=false
| Shadonototra wrote:
| microsoft really turns everything it touches into a giant poop
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Maybe they'll notice that when I launch the game on Linux, I get
| about 10-20 FPS boost over Windows on identical hardware. I've
| always wondered about that; in theory shouldn't it be the
| reverse?
| bool3max wrote:
| Probably the JVM implementation. I have observed the same
| effect on my system.
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| On top of the JVM implementation potentially being faster,
| OpenGL drivers on Linux are sometimes better than their Windows
| counterparts; especially with the less modern OGL that
| Minecraft uses
| frostirosti wrote:
| I mean, it's the JVM in the end right? It depends on the JVM
| you're running on between windows and linux
| oauea wrote:
| Interesting design choice to have the website not be scrollable
| while showing content outside the fold.
|
| edit: Apparently this happens when running the "I don't care
| about cookies" browser extension, which is necessary to make the
| web somewhat usable after the EU's ridiculous ruling.
| sneak wrote:
| Are there any products whatsoever that come out of Microsoft that
| don't contain spyware?
| genewitch wrote:
| Comfort curve 4000 keyboard without the "driver" software?
| drusepth wrote:
| It's not productive to be hyperbolic or reductive. There's a
| huge difference between telemetry and spyware, especially in
| this context.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It all depends on if informed consent was obtained first.
| Anything that is collecting data about me or my use of my
| machines without my informed consent is spying in any
| context.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's an option to turn this off, but even if
| there isn't, since it's Java Edition, a mod could easily be
| created to turn it off anyway.
| juice_bus wrote:
| It is still quite frustrating that it has come to the point
| that you may need to mod a game you purchased to avoid
| telemetry.
| eclipxe wrote:
| I don't really mind this. There is no impact to me by having
| this telemetry in place.
| altcognito wrote:
| Specifically they need to telemetry on the biggest change they
| made: how poorly does the new world generation and chunk loading
| work.
|
| This was a huge change and it is honestly pretty slow even on
| beefy boxes.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| I'm surprised it hadn't already, to be honest.
| kortex wrote:
| > In this release, we are _re-introducing_ diagnostic tracking,
| which was part of Minecraft: Java Edition until 2018.
|
| So it was there, they took it out, now it's back.
| foepys wrote:
| If it was "game crashed, here's the stacktrace" before and now
| (or later) it's "player put 20 blocks of gold on server IP
| 127.0.0.1 with players foo, bar, baz present", it's a
| difference.
| DHowett wrote:
| "At this point the only implemented event is world load."
|
| Are you certain about your assertion? Can you link to the
| document where you found it?
| II2II wrote:
| It is a direct quote from the article:
|
| https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-
| snapshot-2...
| [deleted]
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| This is just speculation on your part? Is that all they were
| collecting before? And they are not collecting that now. They
| are collecting:
|
| launcher identifier user identitifer (XUID) client session id
| (changes on restart) world session id (changes per world
| load, to be reused for later events) game version operating
| system name and version Java runtime version if client or
| server is modded (same information as on crash logs) server
| type (single player, Realms or other) game mode
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| Pretty sure GDPR and CCPA would prevent almost all of that
| from being stored.
| xahrepap wrote:
| According to Minecraft YouTuber/commentator Xisumavoid[1], it
| was removed for GDPR or a related law. And now they're adding
| it back in a compliant manner.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WEX_ICnZHE or the snapshot
| video just before it?
| joshghent wrote:
| Weird that a Microsoft product would get hard to disable
| telemetry...
|
| All jokes aside though, this doesn't seem too bad and I can put
| myself in their shoes to understand why they want this data. It
| would be difficult to monotone this information (asides maybe a
| nice shiny new Surface machine).
| swalls wrote:
| Even if they're not doing anything nefarious with that data, I'm
| against telemetry other than crash reports because data driven
| design makes for _boring_ art.
| skeaker wrote:
| This assumes that the only bugs or other glaring issues that
| can be found with telemetry are crashes. There can be non-
| design-related problems with a program that negatively affect
| the experience without crashing it that can also only really be
| found with telemetry.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-30 23:02 UTC)