Microsoft is releasing a cross-platform code editor

[mwb1100]

MS is releasing a cross-platform programming editor (in preview stage right now)

  - https://code.visualstudio.com/Download
  - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/29/microsoft-releases-free-visual-studio-code-and-visual-studio-2015-rc/

And to make it clear, they are spying on you:  “When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don't want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install this tool.”

I haven't tried it out yet, but if it comes close to the editing capabilities in VS, it'll be interesting to me.

[wraith808]

I don't call collecting crash dumps 'spying' on you by definition.  It really depends on what is collected to a large extent.  That said, not to allow those to be cut off is not a good thing.  Though I do remember it for a few different products recently.  I think Atom does the same, but it's open source, so you can remove it in theory though most won't in practice.

[mwb1100]

The spying comment was just joking. 

It looks like this is a stand-alone version of the javascript based "Monaco" online editor that MS has been using on various websites for a while.  Not that I know anything about Monaco.

[phitsc]

Just looking at the web site, this really looks like a very capable editor. The next challenger for Sublime maybe.

[ewemoa]

I think Atom does the same, but it's open source, so you can remove it in theory though most won't in practice.

I'm not sure that the first time the data is sent for Atom that you know that your MAC address is harvested or that you know soon enough to prevent it.  When I tried Atom, I did not feel good about this part.

On a more positive note, Chrome seems to use RAPPOR - a pretty interesting approach to collecting data.

Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response, or RAPPOR, is a technology for crowdsourcing statistics from end-user client software, anonymously, with strong privacy guarantees. In short, RAPPORs allow the forest of client data to be studied, without permitting the possibility of looking at individual trees. By applying randomized response in a novel manner, RAPPOR provides the mechanisms for such collection as well as for efficient, high-utility analysis of the collected data. In particular, RAPPOR permits statistics to be collected on the population of client-side strings with strong privacy guarantees for each client, and without linkability of their reports.

via https://research.google.com/pubs/pub42852.html

Some folks at MS appear to be involved in research in this area, so may be they use something analogous in some of their products.

[ewemoa]

Sorry double-post.

To make up for that...

Here's something from MS -- IIUC one of their research folks (Cynthia Dwork) is the creator(?) of Differential Privacy (mentioned in a RAPPOR paper FWIW):

In 1977 Dalenius articulated a desideratum for statistical databases: nothing about an individual should be learnable from the database that cannot be learned without access to the database. We give a general impossibility result showing that a formalization of Dalenius’ goal along the lines of semantic security cannot be achieved. Contrary to intuition, a variant of the result threatens the privacy even of someone not in the database. This state of affairs suggests a new measure, differential privacy, which, intuitively, captures the increased risk to one’s privacy incurred by participating in a database. The techniques developed in a sequence of papers [8, 13, 3], culminating in those described in [12], can achieve any desired level of privacy under this measure. In many cases, extremely accurate information about the database can be provided while simultaneously ensuring very high levels of privacy.

via http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64346

[mwb1100]

I learned a new word:

desideratum

via http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64346

I doubt that I'll ever use it (or probably ever see it again).  Why couldn't she have said, "In 1977 Dalenius stated that statistical databases should have the following property: ..."