Re: Trusting trust [was: PARTIAL DIAGNOSIS of Installation problems]

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The part that I find more interesting is the "emergent evil" thing.
> Somehow the techies found that it is OK to do that and they did,
> in the best of their intentions.

I'm not surprised: it's quite common to want to get some kind of
information about how your program performs (i.e. things like profiling
your code), and it's often hard to get a good view of that with
artificial local tests, so there's a strong motivation to try and do
that profiling on "in real life".

Emacs's tradition is to be quite conservative when it comes to
initiating network connections, but nowadays many if not most
applications have some kind of "call home" functionality (e.g. to check
if there's a more recent release).  It's absurdly considered normal.


        Stefan