Visual Studio 2015 and telemetry calls

Started by Michael Paquierover 9 years ago3 messages
#1Michael Paquier
michael.paquier@gmail.com

Hi all,

Some people may have bumped into the following surprise for VS2015:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/10/1350245/visual-studio-2015-c-compiler-secretly-inserts-telemetry-code-into-binaries

VS 2015 is adding calls to telemetry (surprise!) to track activity of
an application... I can't believe that everybody wants that as enabled
and a workaround to disable it is to add notelemetry.obj to the linker
visibly. So could we consider disabling telemetry as the default
behavior when building Postgres? Anybody willing to enable that could
just fork and hack the scripts in src/tools/msvc/.

Thoughts?
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Michael

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#2Michael Paquier
michael.paquier@gmail.com
In reply to: Michael Paquier (#1)
Re: Visual Studio 2015 and telemetry calls

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Michael Paquier
<michael.paquier@gmail.com> wrote:

Some people may have bumped into the following surprise for VS2015:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/10/1350245/visual-studio-2015-c-compiler-secretly-inserts-telemetry-code-into-binaries

VS 2015 is adding calls to telemetry (surprise!) to track activity of
an application... I can't believe that everybody wants that as enabled
and a workaround to disable it is to add notelemetry.obj to the linker
visibly. So could we consider disabling telemetry as the default
behavior when building Postgres? Anybody willing to enable that could
just fork and hack the scripts in src/tools/msvc/.

Thoughts?

Actually, it would not be weird to enable it in DEBUG builds but
disable it by default. After more research this can emit as well ETW
events for Windows (sort of equivalent of dtrace for Windows).
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Michael

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#3Craig Ringer
craig@2ndquadrant.com
In reply to: Michael Paquier (#1)
Re: Visual Studio 2015 and telemetry calls

On 22 July 2016 at 10:45, Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Some people may have bumped into the following surprise for VS2015:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/10/1350245/visual-studio-2015-c-compiler-secretly-inserts-telemetry-code-into-binaries

VS 2015 is adding calls to telemetry (surprise!) to track activity of
an application...

It's already been removed.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/06/visual-cpp-telemetry .

Frankly I think it's a good idea, it was just stupid to do it silently and
by default especially on release builds. It didn't actually send data
anywhere unless locally enabled, though.

This is mostly a storm in a teacup, IMO, and if undesired it sounds like
it's just necessary to build with VS 2015 update 3. I don't personally see
it as particularly different to inserting dtrace events or similar.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-update3-vs

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Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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