Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by magic_smoke_ee 541 days ago
In 1996, IBM's AIX with the web browser packages installed (NCSA Mosaic or Netscape, I can't recall which) silently sent telemetry back to their mothership without any clear notice or opt-out mechanism. They just sent data back home every few hours without telling their customers what they were up to. I discovered this because it was constantly keeping an ISDN router dialing at all hours, racking up telco bills for a dial-on-demand connection. Fixed by deny listing that particular IP to be un-routable.