I audited the privacy of popular free dev tools, the results are terrifying | Hacker News Reader

I audited the privacy of popular free dev tools, the results are terrifying

toolbox-kit.com

53 pointsWaitWaitWha30 comments

Open articleView on HN

That's why real programmers are those who can work offline without the Internet. (just the repositories)

local first.

Yeah, I run all my LLMs offline. That way I don't need documentation at all!

(I jest of course.)

I love regex101.com, so really happy to see it breaks the mold here.

> Free Dev Tools

And test only online websites (」°ロ°)」

Using canary URLs in these and other sites may be interesting too.

Can we stop it with "and the results are terrifying", "and you won't believe what I found", "the <x> situation is insane", etc.? The over-hyping of low quality, low effort content is making it hard to find actually interesting or informative things.

Find a better and more accessible solution than clickbait.

Please, do it.

"Privacy concerns found in audit of popular dev tools" (or something along those lines) would work without feeling sensationalized.

Yes this one time. I’m speaking generally in response to the general plea.

I’m not sure what you mean. Not clickbait is the better alternative.

If that were true, it wouldn’t be such a popular problem. Right? Clearly HN is falling into the same pattern of all the other sites. Engagement hacking blah blah blah.

You have it backwards. If it weren’t true, clickbait wouldn’t be a problem.

I think you’re the one with it backwards.

You continue to view this through the self-centered eyes of the consumer. But you’re actually the product so your perspective doesn’t matter to the seller or the buyer. That’s why this problem doesn’t get fixed.

In this case I'd say the "clickbait" is justified... these results are downright horrific IMO.

"better", "more accessible"? What the hell are you talking about? Clickbait doesn't make anything better or more accessible.

Instead, it makes it impossible to pre-select for interesting information. Instead of telling you what something is about, it tells you how you should feel about it. That's not improving accessibility.

I meant from the author’s perspective. Clickbait is too easy, which is probably why it’s so popular.

Oh completely. But my perspective is that we all should individually punish clickbait by not clicking. More broadly, we should strive to keep HN full of quality tech content rather than clickbait.

Yea I was thinking the same thing.

When you reach for the most exaggerated, over-the-top word possible when describing something relatively mundane, what will you use when you talk about something that actually is "terrifying?"

“The most terrifying thing you’ve ever heard”. You can even stick with that one as long as your subjects are monotonically scary.

> “Every day, millions of developers paste sensitive code, API keys, passwords, database queries, and proprietary business logic into free online tools.”

What, me worry? Alfred E. Newman at it again.

what dev uses public websites to do any kind of work?

I would say a comically large percentage of them do.

Why would you use a web site to format JSON, encode/decode base64, take a diff...

These are all things your local computer can do just fine.

Comment is a bit of an aside, but it's a shame what happened to JSONFormatter.org. The UI was preferable to alternatives for me, it ranked highly in Google so I could just search "JSON formatter" and access it, etc.

Now the site freezes 50% of the time when loading it on my Mac and when it doesn't freeze, there's a 5 second period of waiting before I can paste any input. Not to mention ads taking up 40% of the screen. The classic tech cycle of life.

Man Enters Cage With Face-Eating Leopard Surprised When Leopard Eats Face

Glad that I am using Firefox with:

- uBlock Origin

- cookieAutodelete

- privacy badger

Any additions to my arsenal welcome!

Ironfox/Librewolf with just uBlock. The more extensions you have the way easier you are to fingerprint.

None of this matters if you're literally sending sensitive data to someone else's server.

That is a risk I can calculate and take. The trackers are sth else.

Decent article. Painful to read the LLM output.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com