KSP 1.8 - No analytics, no game?

[k00b]

why are people so butthurt about "analytics" ? - you guys don't have windows 10 ? (...or tinfoil hats alternatively)

what am i missing ? thanks.

[PT]

1 hour ago, k00b said:

why are people so butthurt about "analytics" ? - you guys don't have windows 10 ? (...or tinfoil hats alternatively)

what am i missing ? thanks.

There are multiple reasons to hate it.

1. Its not KSP related analytics. Its just Unity engine gathering everything they can. so it pretty much violates our privacy without giving us anything in return.

2. It will consume network bandwidth in background. That's primary reason I blocked it, as having lag-spike in battle because some nosy company wants my data is irritating. (I fly with MechJeb so I can play other games during 30min ion burn)

3. Can't disable. No, leaving your data on some website to "opt-out" is not "disable".

4. Yet another unnecessary thing that can break. It sure will be fun for game to crash during landing because data spy got bug

Primary reason for me is #2, that's why I disabled all spy modules in Win10 because stupid M$ could not be smart enough to steal my data when I am NOT aiming at someones head

Edited October 20, 2019 by PT

[k00b]

12 minutes ago, PT said:

There are multiple reasons to hate it.

1. Its not KSP related analytics. Its just Unity engine gathering everything they can. so it pretty much violates our privacy without giving us anything in return.

2. It will consume network bandwidth in background. That's primary reason I blocked it, as having lag-spike in battle because some nosy company wants my data is irritating. (I fly with MechJeb so I can play other games during 30min ion burn)

3. Can't disable. No, leaving your data on some website to "opt-out" is not "disable".

4. Yet another unnecessary thing that can break. It sure will be fun for game to crash during landing because data spy got bug

Primary reason for me is #2, that's why I disabled all spy modules in Win10 because stupid M$ could not be smart enough to steal my data when I am NOT aiming at someones head

1) they are gathering boring metadata

2) kerbals doesn't have "battle mode" / said "nosey" company is who is providing the games for you to play on.

3) see: '1)'

4) dunno how background logging software can "break games" BUT i don't know about coding.

footnote: "stupid M$ could not be smart enough to steal my data"... - pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft

 

[PT]

1 hour ago, k00b said:

1) they are gathering boring metadata

2) kerbals doesn't have "battle mode" / said "nosey" company is who is providing the games for you to play on.

3) see: '1)'

4) dunno how background logging software can "break games" BUT i don't know about coding.

footnote: "stupid M$ could not be smart enough to steal my data"... - pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft

 

1. Its MY boring metadata.

2. You realize there are other games than KSP, and that modern computers are capable of running multiple programs at "same" time? And with enough mods you can have battle mode.

3. See 1.

4. Bugs. Bugs are everywhere. 

footnote: "... when I am NOT aiming at someones head". Mind the context.

Edited October 20, 2019 by PT

[DoctorDavinci]

1 hour ago, k00b said:

2) kerbals doesn't have "battle mode" / said "nosey" company is who is providing the games for you to play on.

You were saying?

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, k00b said:

you guys don't have windows 10

No. Windows 7. How did you know?

[k00b]

2 hours ago, PT said:

1. Its MY boring metadata.

you obviously don't read the small print...

what do you mean by "aiming at someones head" exactly ?

[vossiewulf]

The problem with getting spun up about not meaningful data collection is it makes people stop listening, and then they're not listening when someone does try to collect something concerning.

If you want to live in a world where no data about you can be collected, invent a time machine or go entirely off the grid. Otherwise, this is the modern world and it makes more sense to focus efforts and resistance on situations where someone is trying to collect something other than boring metadata.

[Guest]

Meaningful or not, I don't want it wasting my bandwidth. When I play a game, I want my computer to devote all its resources to the game. I don't want it to waste CPU time, memory, network or anything else on doing useless stuff like reporting boring metadata. I don't care if some company wants to serve me ads I'll block on principle, anyway. This data collection does nothing to help me. Therefore, I want to get rid of it.

I've already eviscerated Windows 10 data collection systems for that reason. It is my computer and it will be spending its time on things I want it to do. 

[Superfluous J]

42 minutes ago, k00b said:

what do you mean by "aiming at someones head" exactly ?

Not the poster you quoted, but I'm 100% sure it means, exactly, using your mouse to aim your digital gun at a digital head on your screen, its placement determined by network traffic that may or may not be hindered by KSP gathering metadata in the background.

[k00b]

5 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Not the poster you quoted, but I'm 100% sure it means, exactly, using your mouse to aim your digital gun at a digital head on your screen, its placement determined by network traffic that may or may not be hindered by KSP gathering metadata in the background.

so they think that microsoft is less "smart" then a "developer, publisher and marketer of interactive entertainment" ?.

damn pesky .txt eating up my 50mb/s internet "GRRRRR" - i would have totally got that headshot...

[Guest]

If your internet is something to the tune of 1000kb/s, then yes, you will feel that. That's what I have to work with. I don't play multiplayer myself, but my little brother does. I simply can't afford to waste my bandwidth for useless analytics. Likewise, KSP needs every bit of CPU it can get. Collecting and sending data is not free. Many devs today think they can waste their user's memory, network bandwidth and HD space, but the fact that most PCs can cope with that under normal conditions is not an excuse for being sloppy. Good coding practices apply no matter if you're coding for modern gaming PCs or a PDP-11, and including useless analytics is very much not a good coding practice.

[Laie]

1 hour ago, vossiewulf said:

If you want to live in a world where no data about you can be collected, invent a time machine or go entirely off the grid.

This is fine / there is no alternative  / you have no agency. That attitude irks me to no end.

(Self-censored the remainder of this post for being too obviously political)

 

[azander]

1) I never gave unity permission to collect said metadata.  Doesn't matter that is is boring, or not. 

  1a) I was given the upgrade and no new agreement for EULA for either Squad/Take2 or Unity.  Clearly I  did not agree to have my data collected.

2) I have a very fixed amount of bandwidth per month, and a slow(ish) connection.  Unity is stealing some of that.  Just like Microsoft would, if It could (I use linux).  Again without my permission.  Will they provide compensation for said data use?

3) Where is their disclosure statements? Where is their Data retention and use policy?  

  3a) in the US, this is a FTC violation.  Maybe a class action should be started?  In the EU this is clearly a GDPR issue. 

4) As other have said, it is just one more point of potential failure.

5) Changes to the EULA need to be announced and should require a new "Yes I agree" when it changes when we get an update.  They f ailed to do this.

 

#1, #1a, #3, #3a, and #5 are the important ones.  

#2 is a problem for some, like myself.  Remember not everyone has a good internet connection available to them.  I'm lucky to get 1Mbps out of my connection, and the latency is very high (1000ms+).  I do not have the option for fiber, cable, or DSL.  So those that say this isn't a big deal... Are YOU,  Squad/Take2, or Unity going to provide that good internet connection so I can use their game/program without it lagging my connection that is SHARED across several computers? I doubt it, so they better stop stealing my bandwidth and 'you' had better stop saying that their collection isn't a minor or non-issue.    It may not affect my gameplay while playing KSP, but it may affect my SO's use of the internet at the time.  So it doesn't affect "just me".

 

[Clockwork13]

On 10/17/2019 at 7:42 PM, swjr-swis said:

More Unity Analytics crap as part of the new engine, I notice. Connecting, crash reporting, performance reporting, tracking, 'standard events'. And the ever so ironically named 'data privacy' - yes, that is actually in the same filename as 'analytics'; got a good chuckle outta that one.

Except now, unlike up to 1.7.3, we can no longer disable it entirely by deleting/renaming the DLLs - the game basically either doesn't load at all, or gets indefinitely stuck in the loading screens (thank you for that, btw, it's the first time I've been able to see all the available loading screens).

So, from 1.8.0 on, this means no analytics, no game?

I guess I no longer need to wait for a definitive version of KSP. 1.3.1 it is.

 

T2 has one of the most egregious data privacy policies I've ever seen from a company. Just stick with 1.3.1, the newer versions have almost nothing of value besides for a few new parts and bits of functionality. KSP 1.3.1 is what I use and it works great.

On 10/17/2019 at 7:52 PM, Snark said:

My own personal approach to muzzling the analytics, last time around, was to just add some entries to my hosts file so that any network traffic to the relevant internet sites would just get redirected to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and end up just shouting down a hole.

IMO, this is the best approach. Also as a sidenote, wireshark might be useful for figuring out where it's sending requests to.

 

With this aggressive anti-privacy stance from T2, that's another reason why I'm skeptical of KSP2. I understand most people don't really care about that sort of thing and it'll probably do fine regardless, but I know that I'm not going to waste my time trying it if it's as privacy-invasive as KSP 1.8 is.

 

As another side note, don't trust 'opt out' features. I remember facebook had something like this and it didn't respect whether a user had opted out or not. T2 might be the same way. It's also possible that the Unity update may have to do it, as they don't have the best privacy track record either. Though it's probably T2.

 

Lastly, unlike the original KSP team, T2 doesn't care about making a good product or respecting its paying customers. Like most big companies, especially just big gaming companies, they just care about making money through any means possible, even if that means taking away the player's right to privacy. It's a shame that situation befell KSP, although not surprising. Anyways that concludes my mini-rant lol. This post ended up being a lot bigger than i intended.

[k00b]

4 minutes ago, azander said:

1) I never gave unity permission to collect said metadata.  Doesn't matter that is is boring, or not. 

  1a) I was given the upgrade and no new agreement for EULA for either Squad/Take2 or Unity.  Clearly I  did not agree to have my data collected.

2) I have a very fixed amount of bandwidth per month, and a slow(ish) connection.  Unity is stealing some of that.  Just like Microsoft would, if It could (I use linux).  Again without my permission.  Will they provide compensation for said data use?

3) Where is their disclosure statements? Where is their Data retention and use policy?  

  3a) in the US, this is a FTC violation.  Maybe a class action should be started?  In the EU this is clearly a GDPR issue. 

4) As other have said, it is just one more point of potential failure.

5) Changes to the EULA need to be announced and should require a new "Yes I agree" when it changes when we get an update.  They f ailed to do this.

 

#1, #1a, #3, #3a, and #5 are the important ones.  

#2 is a problem for some, like myself.  Remember not everyone has a good internet connection available to them.  I'm lucky to get 1Mbps out of my connection, and the latency is very high (1000ms+).  I do not have the option for fiber, cable, or DSL.  So those that say this isn't a big deal... Are YOU,  Squad/Take2, or Unity going to provide that good internet connection so I can use their game/program without it lagging my connection that is SHARED across several computers? I doubt it, so they better stop stealing my bandwidth and 'you' had better stop saying that their collection isn't a minor or non-issue.    It may not affect my gameplay while playing KSP, but it may affect my SO's use of the internet at the time.  So it doesn't affect "just me".

"ding ding round 2."

1 / 1a) yes you did, you just didn't read the small print.

2) then turn your internet off; kerbals is a single player game... (you want "compensation" for subjectively choosing to play on computer games whilst leaving your internet on ???)

3/ 3a) here you go - https://unity3d.com/legal/privacy-policy

4) potentially... being very neurotic (might also get hit by a bus.)

5) they don't need to do this, so why would you expect them to do this, when you are already in agreement with them ?

i wish you well trying to take an algorithm to the supreme court (not that if that was even possible, it would have a case to answer...)

 

 

[Clockwork13]

8 hours ago, k00b said:

why are people so butthurt about "analytics" ? - you guys don't have windows 10 ? (...or tinfoil hats alternatively)

what am i missing ? thanks.

Windows Analytics can be turned off entirely, although it usually requires a third party program in order to do thoroughly and completely. The point is though, it can be done.

A handful of us (myself included) do not use Windows 10.

 

Edit: Another thing I feel should be pointed out is that it may not just be 'boring metadata'; the fact that KSP is closed source means there's no way to find out what exactly it's sending. Depending on what you classify as boring metadata, it can be used to identify people uniquely in some pretty interesting ways, such as recording how fast you type down to the millisecond and then pairing that up with other data to give you a unique ID (which is a real thing), all without you knowing. Although more commonly it'll just identify you by your IP or physical address

There's two main problems with this:

1. It's often given to third parties, which T2's EULA admits to. We don't know who these third parties are, which on top of the privacy issues already at hand, makes it an even more alarming security and privacy issue.

2. Data breaches happen, potentially making the information collected on you public. Many companies, especially ones that are supposed to be entrusted with our personal info, don't even bother with security.

Combining those two points, a notorious example of this was when Equifax got hacked. Granted, I seriously doubt T2 is elevating its data collection all the way to social security numbers (though it definitely has the capability), Equifax *somehow* got ahold of hundreds of millions of SSNs, most of which from people who've never even used their service.

Edited October 21, 2019 by Clockwork13

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, k00b said:

so they think that microsoft is less "smart" then a "developer, publisher and marketer of interactive entertainment" ?.

I have no idea. I just know what they meant by what they said

I personally have no iron in this fire. I try really hard to care but at the end of the day I just don't.

[steve_v]

14 hours ago, k00b said:

why are people so butthurt about "analytics" ? - you guys don't have windows 10 ?

Of course not, why in the nine hells would I want to run that awful thing?
As for buthurt, I'm simply liquided off that KSP is still checking in with unity analytics even after I have explicitly told it not to. No means "no", not "just a little bit".

What is software that actively ignores or circumvents the users commands called? Software that requires you use external tools like firewalls to prevent it tampering with systems it has no business with or extracting information you don't want others to have?
Over here I know it as malware.

 

12 hours ago, k00b said:

they are gathering boring metadata

I for one don't care what they are gathering, only that they gather it without my say so, and continue to try to interact with my system over the network despite me explicitly telling them not to.
My box, my rules, no exceptions. I've said stop phoning home Squad, DBAD and quit trying to sneak around me.

Have you actually read what data T2's EULA allows them collect and share with third-parties? I have, and I can assure you that it is a far cry from "boring metadata".
Perhaps the "opt-out" does reduce this to benign anonymised metadata, perhaps that's all it was to begin with... The question is: Do you trust Take Two Interactive to honour their word on this?
I most certainly do not, nor do I trust them to do anything else that is remotely beneficial for the end-user unless it also makes them money.
More detailed data directly equates to more profit for them, and there's no incentive not to lie to us about it if they think they can get away with it.

Does the manufacturer of your toaster have a right to check up on when and how much toast you eat? No? How about your car reporting in every time you use it? What if it sent location data too? How would you know?
The attitude that companies are somehow entitled to data on their customers activities, whether "metadata" or not, simply needs to die. It's nothing more or less than exploiting the power imbalance inherent in dealing with large corporations for profit at the expense of the user.

When I see KSP sending zero network traffic, I'll believe that T2 is honouring the opt-out, not before. And I'll still firewall it for if when they pull the old "this agreement is subject to change whenever we feel like it" clause out.

 

5 hours ago, k00b said:

2) then turn your internet off; kerbals is a single player game... (you want "compensation" for subjectively choosing to play on computer games whilst leaving your internet on ???)

Egads. Whut?
So if I don't want the owner of the noodle shop on the corner pickpocketing me for a bit of extra cash every time I eat there, I should just stop going outside?
Seriously? The answer to companies grabbing a bit extra on the side at your expense and against your wishes is to disconnect from the internet? Why didn't I think of that.

 

8 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

If you want to live in a world where no data about you can be collected, invent a time machine or go entirely off the grid. Otherwise, this is the modern world and it makes more sense to focus efforts and resistance on situations where someone is trying to collect something other than boring metadata.

The problem with this is that most collectees have no way of knowing what data is being collected, besides trusting the word of the collector.
In the modern world it makes more sense to simply block as many avenues for data exfiltration as possible, and if that means blocking a bunch of harmless traffic, so be it. It's worth it for when the data becomes harmful without your notice.

For the record, I take exactly the same approach to websites stealing my CPU cycles and introducing egregious attack surfaces to my browser to run their javascript advertising code... Likewise them stealing my bandwidth to share my clicks with all and sundry.
I simply block all advertising because it's too much hassle to work out who can be trusted, just like I firewall all proprietary software that doesn't need to use the network.
I shouldn't have to do either, but I will. The only alternative is to take people at their word, and the word of people who engage in data-mining their customers has been shown time and time again to be worthless.

 

Edited October 21, 2019 by steve_v

[swjr-swis]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

the word of people who engage in data-mining their customers has been shown time and time again to be worthless.

Requoting for truth.

[DoctorDavinci]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

the word of people who engage in data-mining their customers has been shown time and time again to be worthless.

Seconded

[kubi]

According to  https://unity3d.com/legal/privacy-policy , they collect a good amount of personal data and using it in advertisement and other commercial activities.

You can NOT stop KSP/Unity sending the data. The only thing you can do is to opt out on their web site and hope the best.

Looking at the network traffic it connects multiple times to various unity sites even though after the first connection it should just receive the information about the opt out decision of the user. At the minimum, this is really questionable behaviour that can be easily considered as non-ethical. It would really worth a test against GDPR and similar legislations.

In my opinion, KSP shall go to quarantine and be cut off from all network traffic. It is fairly easy to do in all major operating systems. However, it should not be the concern of the user to do so, but the application (KSP; and yes, I do not, and should not care if they use Unity or whatever library, that is their decision, not mine) developer should give a clear choice.

 

[PT]

14 hours ago, k00b said:

so they think that microsoft is less "smart" then a "developer, publisher and marketer of interactive entertainment" ?.

damn pesky .txt eating up my 50mb/s internet "GRRRRR" - i would have totally got that headshot...

Eh. Let me try to use simple words in simple sentences. I'll assume you have now acepted possibility that I play games other than KSP. 

Feel free to ask for clarification if something is too complicated. 

General issues with analytics:

Analytics/Telemetry gather data. 

Analytics/Telemetry sends data. 

Analytics/Telemetry uses bandwidth for certain time to send data. 

By default upload will go at maximum possible speed. 

In case of Microsoft's "Telemetry" it can result in Telemetry reporting process using 100 mb/s ethernet connection for few seconds at full speed. 

My Internet connection is about 100mb/s, so saturated ethernet means saturated internet. 

This is, obviously, my persinal experience with M$ Telemetry which is influenced by how I use my computer.

In my case it results in much more telemetry than for people using PC for single game and webbrowser. 

Such usage of network can result in higher latency (often mislabeled as ping) and/or packet loss. Both of which are a problem for fast paced, real time, games.

MS Telemetry, and related tasks, is working on a schedule. It could be set to run when computer is not in use, like automatic defrag, but MS in their certainly finite wisdom have not choose that way. That's what I called "stupid", it negatively affects my "user experience" when less obstrictive ways exist. 

So I disabled it all, because its net effect on my life was negative. 

And it reflects my personal stance on data collection in other products as well.  Your experience, and priorities, can be different. 

And now for KSP specific issues:

As I mentioned earlier, ion burns can easily take 30 minutes. So I use MechJeb assistance for this tedious task. 

Staring at screen for 30 minutes is boring. 

Therefore I play another game in meantime.

Sometimes its a game which requires aiming at specific parts of body and/or vehicle. Doing that against moving target during your own movement is much easier with stable connection. 

All that deteriorates my experience in game shall be removed. Of course it might be possible that some people enjoy random "lag spikes", but I am definitely not one of them. 

KSP does not require internet connection for playing. Having it hinder my online experience even in slightest way is not acceptable for me. 

Therefore I blocked KSP neywork access, preventing any networking issues to be caused by it. 

Summary:

All of that reflects my personal stance on unnecessary background tasks. In short: "if it is not required for me, it shall be disabled and/or removed". 

I intentinaly left out privacy concerns, as it is not my primary reason to regard unnecessary analytics as evil that should be vanquished. Other forum users explained it well enough already. 

Please forgive any spelling errors and lack of formating. This post has been composed over several visits to toiler, because only when sitting on "throne" I was bored enough to answer in-depth. 

Edited October 21, 2019 by PT

[Snark]

On 10/17/2019 at 1:45 PM, eddiew said:

Be interested in a snippet of that file if you have chance   I always seem to get things backwards in there

On 10/18/2019 at 10:58 AM, klesh said:

Could you be more specific?  I've got a "How to edit your host file" video going, and I'm looking at my host file in Notepad.  What are the relevant internet sites I need to be redirecting to 127.0.0.1?

Well, here's what I'm using.  This is from running Wireshark on a KSP 1.8 install, and filtering for all DNS requests.  I just added a block for anything at all that KSP tried to talk to when I started it up:

127.0.0.1 cdp.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 config.uca.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 perf-events.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 prd-lender.cdp.internal.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 thind-gke-usc.prd.data.corp.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 thind-prd-knob.data.ie.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 remote-config-proxy-prd.uca.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 data-optout-service.uca.cloud.unity3d.com

AFAICT, this is the full list of everything that KSP tries to talk to, at least when I start the game up, open a game, return to main menu, and exit.

 

Important caveats to bear in mind for the above:

• It's not a guaranteed complete list of sites (though I suspect it probably is).
  • Why it's not guaranteed:  Because there's nothing in principle preventing KSP from perhaps trying to access some other site at some other time.  These are just the sites that it accessed while I was watching it.
  • Why I'm not super concerned:  Because I ran through a few cycles of startup / shutdown of KSP, and it hit these same sites every single time.  So I'm guessing this is probably about it.
• There's no guarantee it couldn't change with another update sometime.
  • Of course, it's easy to just run Wireshark again at that time, too. 
• These are just the DNS calls.
  • Why that's a potential concern:  In principle they could be making direct calls to specific IP addresses and I wouldn't see it here, since I'm only tracking DNS requests (because trying to read the full Wireshark output for all network traffic on my computer, including all the other programs that are chattering all the time, would take more of my time than I'm willing to sink into this.)
  • Why I'm not super worried about it:  Because nobody uses direct IP addresses, that's a noob move.  Almost certainly any configured attempts to talk to them will need DNS resolution at least to start with, so blocking all their DNS traffic ought to do the trick, seems to me.

Incidentally, the last time this concern erupted over RedShell stuff a year or two ago, I added the following entries, based on stuff I was reading in the forums at the time:

127.0.0.1 redshell.io
127.0.0.1 api.redshell.io
127.0.0.1 treasuredata.com
127.0.0.1 api.treasuredata.com

...Based on my current Wireshark observations, I'm not seeing any attempts to contact redshell.io; all I see are various *.unity3d.com addresses.  I've left the redshell.io entries in place anyway (because it's not hurting anything, I have no legitimate need to ever go to redshell.io, and why not).  But they may not be actually accomplishing anything anymore.

 

[EDIT] Updated list of sites, thanks @swjr-swis

Edited October 22, 2019 by Snark
Updated with additional site info

[swjr-swis]

38 minutes ago, Snark said:

I just added a block for anything at all that KSP tried to talk to when I started it up:

127.0.0.1 cdp.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 config.uca.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 perf-events.cloud.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 prd-lender.cdp.internal.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 thind-gke-usc.prd.data.corp.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 thind-prd-knob.data.ie.unity3d.com
127.0.0.1 remote-config-proxy-prd.uca.cloud.unity3d.com

AFAICT, this is the full list of everything that KSP tries to talk to, at least when I start the game up, open a game, return to main menu, and exit.

Back when this was first done in this forum, with one of the 1.4.x releases, the entire list was three entries. Now we're up to eight (yours is missing data-optout-service.uca.cloud.unity3d.com).

 

41 minutes ago, Snark said:

There's no guarantee it couldn't change with another update sometime.

QED.

 

42 minutes ago, Snark said:

Incidentally, the last time this concern erupted over RedShell stuff a year or two ago, I added the following entries, based on stuff I was reading in the forums at the time:

127.0.0.1 redshell.io
127.0.0.1 api.redshell.io

Redshell also wanted to contact the following two addresses:

127.0.0.1 treasuredata.com
127.0.0.1 api.treasuredata.com