HN Reader

Please note this heinous and inexcusable overreach is over five years old and was addressed shortly after being caught:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200307082846/https://community...

Wacom now has an opt-in for data collection.

What should be the real continuing inexcusable outrage is that Windows, even today, grants all applications full access to read the titles of all windows with no way to disable it.

If you run Windows, ask yourself what information that leaks and if you trust everything running on your machine not to exfiltrate that.

I am not surprised. We've known for a while old OS design can't fix this. Not in a comprehensive way. We can patch over specific cases but the basic design is wrong. Capability-based OSes like mobile ones tend to work better here.

We can't keep assuming code run on-device is trustworthy. Not just in the "not malware" sense. In that of "does what the user wants and nothing more, nothing less."

(2020)

I have an old unbranded Chinese tablet that came with a CD-ROM containing the driver, configuration utility, their source code, and even a datasheet for the MCU it used. A huge contrast between merely selling a product, and trying to control the whole "experience". IMHO we need more of the former, but corporate attitudes strongly encourage the latter.

Just like all other drawing tablet manufacturers like Huion, for that matter. Block it in your firewall unless you want it to siphon your data.

I feel like this post is from a couple decades old time capsule. 99% of corporate software is just data exfiltration endpoints now, especially the kind of software that hardware manufacturers tend to make for Windows, which is bloated panels with a couple toggles that are only here to collect your data. The privacy policy is simply a cover-up in most cases. It's not like you have a choice either, because other manufacturers are the same. This stuff needs active countermeasures that treat it as hostile, but since it's hardware it often has low-level access.

"We apologize for any confusion regarding data collection being done by the Wacom software driver and the unclarity about the actual information collected."

Again and again: any PR containing "confusion" seems BS to me.

Stop gaslighting! Take responsibility!

Doesn't a MacBook do the same thing?

Not the first time something like this is shown here. And it is very important to say that such a thing is a anti-feature of the driver and that something like this would probably never be acceptable on Linux, where such devices work beautifully just after plugging.

The operating system where these things happen should also be blamed.

(2020)

Related discussion and developments then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247292

And again later, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29056847

oldie but goodie, also I think OSU players wrote their own drivers for this.

In spite of the article being 5 years old, I still found it interesting and relevant.

The details of how the data was captured was helpful.

The things I found most interesting fall into 3 parts:

Part 1) It's heartening to see people enjoying their kids:

> I told my son to clear my schedule. He bashed two wooden blocks together in understanding, encouragement, and sheer admiration.

Go Dad! Enjoy it while you can!

If you have an experience like mine: as a 57yo at the time, and well aware of what was coming. When I went from daily interacting with my son, who was finally old enough to speak with as a adult, he suddenly moved away to college over a weekend and I almost never see him any more 8-(

I never expected the fully anticipated experience of empty-nest to affect me so strongly 8-/

Part 2)

> I care about this for two reasons.

> The first is a principled fuck you.

I had to laugh 8-) This somehow reminded me of a line in one of my favorite movies: The Live Aquatic.

Bill Murray's character is asked: This leopard shark is an endangered species. What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?

To which he replies: Revenge...

Part 3) The obligatory proprietary OS bashing:

Several times, the author states: "A device that is essentially a mouse..."

It should be pointed out, that a mouse is a USB class device. That is to say, it is a standard USB device that requires no proprietary driver (except for the purpose of exfiltrating data that the mouse maker has no functional need of, or other "value added" purposes)

Pretty much any special feature of the device can be implemented as a user space library.

The author is working on a Mac, the situation is even worse on windoze, where even a actual mouse will ask you to install a custom device driver.

This is why linux, with a broad support of standard USB class devices, is now significantly superior to windows in USB device support. For almost any typical type device, when you plug it into a linux computer, it just works. No driver install or other configuration needed.

Even if you need a driver to support your tablet on some version of an OS that doesn't provide support, there is a GPL waycom driver:

https://github.com/linuxwacom/input-wacom

tl;dr: linux good, windoze sux, mac getting worse...

In the current world, every computer company in any way associated with h/w or s/w or online activity is now also in the data borker business.

This is similar to the way the car dealership industry is now basically a subdivision of retail loan banking. Try buying a car with cash, versus a lease or loan. But, of course, it's not just milking the idiot herd for all it can, its "maximizing efficiency", for somebody...

So much for the glowing future brought to you by unbridled capitalism...

That's it. Try not to use Waycom, or at least not on Mac or windoze...