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General discussionWhat is GOG stance on telemetry?(56 posts)(56 posts)
(56 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted April 19, 2018
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Lukaszmik: The problem with Unity games is that you can't really figure out much without having super-pro level of reverse-engineering skills.

It's a closed source proprietary code. Wireshark will only show you encrypted traffic for the parts that are interesting.

I would not be surprised if Unity games end up disclosed to have a way to harvest all metrics stored on a specific machine. Unity loves its data too much for me to be comfortable with, even though I firewall anything trying to knock on the gateway without a damn good reason.

Interestingly enough, a lot of games on GOG require localhost loopback or they crash... and that itself could be used to hook into svchost.exe to get access to network (Windows relies on it to maintain network connection, so unless you have a really fancy firewall that will differentiate between each instance of it running, you're SOL on blocking things).

Mostly, though, I'm concerned at GOG's direction lately. More and more it smells like they are planning to cash in on their userbase metrics. It's a company, that data sure is in demand, but I'd like to have one goddamn source of games that won't fuck me over on the flip-back.
How about an online service? This is why, if I have something particularly confidential (which is almost never, as i'm even open with people about being molested as a child), they better be connecting directly to a service i'm hosting. I've taught people how to use SSH and WinSCP just to pick up or drop a simple text file, before. I assume i'm being listened to at all times, especially after noticing that i really am. There's no way facebook can have such a good profile on the things I like to advertise to me without knowing that i'll never accept any of the friend suggestions it's been giving me. They have a bug on me somewhere.
Posted April 19, 2018
It's well known that I have schizophrenia, and I used to freak out because when I'd talk on vent, TS, or another chat program, I'd get ads in facebook for what I'd talked about. When I posted on certain forums, I would see ads relating to that, even though I wasn't in Facebook at the time.

It's good to see that it's happened to others, and that it's not entirely my illness. Maybe I'm saner than I thought, who knows? Now if only I could work fulltime without falling into a puddle of nonsense...
Posted April 19, 2018
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CymTyr: It's well known that I have schizophrenia, and I used to freak out because when I'd talk on vent, TS, or another chat program, I'd get ads in facebook for what I'd talked about. When I posted on certain forums, I would see ads relating to that, even though I wasn't in Facebook at the time.

It's good to see that it's happened to others, and that it's not entirely my illness. Maybe I'm saner than I thought, who knows? Now if only I could work fulltime without falling into a puddle of nonsense...
Ha, you think that's bad, join LinkedIn. That has got to be the spookiest one of the lot. E.g.
Do you want to link with person x that you met at a pub 20 years and we cannot possibly know that?
It's like they have a hidden camera on you watching your every move.
Posted April 19, 2018
So far, I didn't manage to find any way to disable such hidden telemetry in Unity games.
Btw, I'm surprised noone even attempted to create a "patcher" for it..
Post edited April 19, 2018 by phaolo
Posted April 19, 2018
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ariaspi: I personally make a custom entry in CCleaner for every game that makes this crap.
It looks like you can add an unique path filter like this in CCleaner:
C:\Users\(username)\AppData\LocalLow\*\*\Unity\*\Analytics\ArchivedEvents\*.*

Way more convenient that manually adding an entry every time!
Posted April 19, 2018
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CymTyr: It's well known that I have schizophrenia, and I used to freak out because when I'd talk on vent, TS, or another chat program, I'd get ads in facebook for what I'd talked about. When I posted on certain forums, I would see ads relating to that, even though I wasn't in Facebook at the time.

It's good to see that it's happened to others, and that it's not entirely my illness. Maybe I'm saner than I thought, who knows? Now if only I could work fulltime without falling into a puddle of nonsense...
Sometimes i talk to myself, without programs like teamspeak open. Only once has this happened where i got ads relevant to the conversation i had with myself. I'm still not sure if it was coincidence or not. I wonder if facebook has figured out my favorite song to sing in the shower. Nah, i highly doubt it. probably does know my pooping schedule, though.
Post edited April 19, 2018 by kohlrak
Posted April 19, 2018
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CymTyr: It's well known that I have schizophrenia, and I used to freak out because when I'd talk on vent, TS, or another chat program, I'd get ads in facebook for what I'd talked about. When I posted on certain forums, I would see ads relating to that, even though I wasn't in Facebook at the time.

It's good to see that it's happened to others, and that it's not entirely my illness. Maybe I'm saner than I thought, who knows? Now if only I could work fulltime without falling into a puddle of nonsense...
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nightcraw1er.488: Ha, you think that's bad, join LinkedIn. That has got to be the spookiest one of the lot. E.g.
Do you want to link with person x that you met at a pub 20 years and we cannot possibly know that?
It's like they have a hidden camera on you watching your every move.
And a time machine. "Hey, we found a former class-mate! Wanna connect with him?" ... uh. Guys? That was more than 25 years ago and I had no contact with him ever since. You didn't even exist back then! No social media platform did! What did you do, hack the registry computers of all schools and check which users might have gone to the same schools?
Posted April 19, 2018
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ariaspi: I personally make a custom entry in CCleaner for every game that makes this crap.
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phaolo: It looks like you can add an unique path filter like this in CCleaner:
C:\Users\(username)\AppData\LocalLow\*\*\Unity\*\Analytics\ArchivedEvents\*.*

Way more convenient that manually adding an entry every time!
Thank you for the tip! That actually works. +1 :)

When introducing the path from the program's interface, those asterisks at the end (*.*) should not be pasted.
I ended up having ...\ArchivedEvents\*.*|*.*| in the .ini file and not working.

Pasting
C:\Users\(username)\AppData\LocalLow\*\*\Unity\*\Analytics\ArchivedEvents\
is enough and selecting the Include files and subfolders option.
I attached pictures in case anyone else runs into difficulties and for people not familiar with CCleaner.
Attachments:
include-option.png (23 Kb)
select-this.png (26 Kb)
Post edited April 19, 2018 by ariaspi
Posted May 02, 2018
I ended up making this suggestion: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/remove_online_connectivity_from_galaxydll

Chances that it will become popular are low. And chances that gog will do anything about it are even lower. But I should try, atleast
Posted May 02, 2018
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Gekko_Dekko: I ended up making this suggestion: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/remove_online_connectivity_from_galaxydll

Chances that it will become popular are low. And chances that gog will do anything about it are even lower. But I should try, atleast
Thank you and you got a vote for what it's worth.
Posted May 02, 2018
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Gekko_Dekko: I ended up making this suggestion: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/remove_online_connectivity_from_galaxydll

Chances that it will become popular are low. And chances that gog will do anything about it are even lower. But I should try, atleast
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Posted May 05, 2018
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AlienMind: You have no chance to survive
from the wide point of view, no living creature have a chance to survive. Yet everybody keeps tryharding. And so I
Post edited May 05, 2018 by Gekko_Dekko
Posted May 11, 2018
Something in Battletech is trying to "phone home" to an Amazon AWS / cloudfront server, and the game crashes if you tell your firewall to block the attempt to access.
Posted May 11, 2018
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Killjoy_Cutter: Something in Battletech is trying to "phone home" to an Amazon AWS / cloudfront server, and the game crashes if you tell your firewall to block the attempt to access.
It's a Unity game and usually the Unity's telemetry is phoning to those Amazon/cloudfront servers (see my post here). I don't have Battletech to test it, but I had no problems blocking other Unity games in the firewall. I don't use the Windows firewall, but the one included in Kaspersky Internet Security. Try running the game with your network cable unplugged and see if it still crashes.

Read the other posts in this thread on how to clean with CCleaner those telemetry files.
Posted May 11, 2018
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Gekko_Dekko: I ended up making this suggestion: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/remove_online_connectivity_from_galaxydll

Chances that it will become popular are low. And chances that gog will do anything about it are even lower. But I should try, atleast
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AlienMind: You have no chance to survive make your time.
All your base are belong to us.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionWhat is GOG stance on telemetry?(56 posts)(56 posts)
(56 posts)