I'd really urge the author to rethink doing something like this at all. The app looks great but those stats on the front page were an immediate turn-off for me (not to mention how it pops up in what looks like an annoying cookie banner). You can talk about user activity on a web service where it makes sense to be hitting a server, but for a local app that should really just be a nice GUI for ffmpeg, I don't want my computer updating you whenever I use it with data about how I used it.
And the types of users who are going to be using something like an ffmpeg wrapper are the types who are gonna care about something like that.
It's not SaaS anyway, so why would I care about your current to-the-hour success metrics? Might as well just slap your amount of sales up there, it's less intrusive at least. Put some user testimonials, anything other than telemetry data.
I agree with you to a point. The problem is that if most people turn it off, then developing the telemetry system was a huge waste of time and resources for not much gain. Valuable data that could have been used to improve the program without any extra work from others may be lost.
Similar to Windows forcing users to update because most of them keep putting it off forever, hurting their own security.
I wouldn't worry about it if I was the developer. Many people on HN might care but most people on average (even semi-technical folks using a tool like this) probably don't care. Most products have some sort of telemetry capabilities built-in (and any smart developer should try and understand their audience and app usage) and the people who care probably tend to on average be more wary about downloading closed-source non-App Store apps anyway etc.
It's not mentioned in the terms of service either.
I would recommend removing this because it's against the GDPR... and even foreign companies have to comply (for the protection of European citizens, wherever they are) if they offer goods and/ or services to citizens in the EU in some way (European region of an app store, ad campaigns in Europe, etc.) I also think that the GDPR is pretty correct in requiring opt-in consent before tracking, so it's "the decent thing".
That’s at best a weak band-aid. Who knows if blocking that one domain stops everything? We shouldn’t have to resort to firewalls or DNS filters to stop local apps from collecting our information.
I switched from a self-hosted transfer.sh instance to a selfhosted ffsend instance with r2 backend. Quality is much higher, easy to run on docker and its end-to-end encrypted. With the cli tools you can easily upload files from command line.
I thought of self-hosting this (it's fantastic, by the way), but why do that when there are public instances? Feels like too much work for little benefit.
For us, GitLab is the perfect match between enterprise (GitHub, Jira) and open-source software. We used the OSS version for years and switched to EE 2-3 years ago.
Depends on the location. If iWay does have a POP in your network, they can offer native IPv6 because their DHCP does support it. If they don't have a POP, they often (need to) use Swisscom to "proxy" your packages (like Crossover7). And because the Swisscom DHCP Server can't assign IPv6 leases currently, your router needs to tunnel IPv6 packages in IPv4 packages to the infrastructure of iWay.
60€ / month plus a one-time-fee of 100€. if you want 25 gbit/s (and if the POP supports it), you pay a one-time-fee of 310€. But the availability is currently very restricted to urban regions
In Italy a 1Gbps/200Mbps FTTH connection is around €25-30/mo, without any upfront setup cost. Some ISPs even gives out Fritzboxes as their free router, and even include a landline number with unlimited phone calls.
A 50Mb/10Mb connection often cost around 30€/Month + 70€ one time in Germany but:
- You often only get it in city areas, I say city areas because metro areas include small settlements around the city still connected with the metro. And in many experience it's quite likely the best you can get in that settlements is either way less or unreliable high latency LTE.
- There are faster contracts like 250Mb/40Mb for 45€/Month but availability is spotty, and companies will sell it to you even if not technical available. E.g. most 100Mb contracts say serving 60Mb would still be "valid" for your 100Mb contract.
- It's not uncommon that many DSL of different people will go through choke points in areas with high population density but not that much money, so speeds dropping sometime randomly noticeable are not uncommon.
- It's common that if there are technical problems (which are not uncommon when switching providers) it can take days to fix them, my previous (small) company went a month without proper internet connection due to this, they fell back to using a LTE router temporary but they had to buy it themself it wasn't provided by the internet provider.
A good point is that all the internet contracts tend include a land line phone number and tend to have "unlimited" data volume (which isn't always truly unlimited, but close enough to unlimited).
Frequent stories include internet being so bad that it frequently is short term temporary(<15min) unavailable, randomly temporary super slow internet, or a supposedly 100Mb internet connection frequently slowing down to close to 1Mb causing video conferences to fail. And that is in the city.
Outside of cities it's common to have insanely slow internet all the time to a point that people fall back to use LTE->WLAN routers, but then it's common to hear that the LTE is frequently overloaded around "rush hours" making people at the "outer ranges" of the closest LTE tower lose connection.
The state of the German internet infrastructure is kinda a sad joke.
Through I should note that things differ depending on the area of Germany you are in.
Anyway the best thing I can buy (and get) in my area (in a relatively wealthy area of Berlin) is ~60Mb/10Mb connection which is somewhat reliable (fails 0-4 times every day for ~1-5min each, but it only happens between 2am and 6am, so ok, not a problem and at least one failure is probably the router).
EDIT: Just to be clear the biggest joke are not the ISP's but the politicians which let themself be bribed not only to tolerate but actively support this situation. Through it's also incompetence not to long ago some politician responsible for making regulations in this area stated (and believed) that ???Kb (forgot the actual value but it was less then 1Mb) is high speed internet. It's sad if politician are stuck years in the past and are so arrogant and incompetent that educating them about their mistake is destined to fail.
This spotty internet in Berlin is interesting. I have a Vodafone cable and I get 5 minute cuts to tje connection every now and then. Usually around 6pm to 8pm. Always five minutes, the modem blinks the lights and internet is back on. Every now and then it happens earlier and that really sucks when having a zoom meeting.
I monitor my internet with Grafana and can provide stats for these problems for the past few years...
