[Wine] Is winetricks sending reports to the developer?

James McKenzie jjmckenzie51 at gmail.com
Sun Feb 27 20:01:14 CST 2011


On 2/27/11 5:15 PM, jorl17 wrote:
> kartal wrote:
>> dimesio wrote:
>>> kartal wrote:
>>>> "
>>>> Not sure what this is supposed to be. Is it saying that the developer is getting usage reports by default? If so how nasty is that. I did nto use the -optin option, it sounds like it is --optin by default. Quite disgusting, whatever that is .
>>> My understanding is that it is off by default, and only turned on if the user voluntarily opts in. Are you sure you didn't opt in at some point, perhaps while experimenting with winetricks? Once you opt in, it will stay that way until you actively opt out.
>>
>> I doubt that I was messing with it, and I doubt that I did optin willingly. This tactic is used by malware developers and I just  hopr that this was not intentional in any way.
>>
>> There is nothing wrong with asking people`s feedback, or usage statistics, as  long as it is done transparently and openly.
>
> It was either a bug with your particular winetricks setup (which IMO seems unlikely) or you accidentally enabled it. Note that when you first use winetricks it pops up a dialog that asks you this. Maybe you just ignored what it said and clicked yes?
>
> I can assure you that the developer of winetricks is not a "malware developer" and he certainly doesn't care about your information. He's gathering data to enable you (and us) to have a better experience, AFAIK. You don't need to fear anything.
>
Actually, I'm surprised that neither Dan or Austin have not chimed in 
yet.  Yes, there is NO malware in winetricks and if you know something 
about bash shell scripting, you can read it yourself (it is after all a 
text file.)  I did and there is nothing there that is malicious.  
However, it does 'phone home' with each run to advise what 'program' you 
tried to install and if it was successful or not.  This is the kind of 
information commonly requested by them when problems occur.

James Mckenzie




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