On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Henry Hartley <he...@dotrose.com> wrote: > On 7/30/2010 10:24 AM, Steve VanSlyck wrote: >> >> From: nevio carlos de alarcão<nevinhoalar...@gmail.com> >>> Hi, could you explain what does this dial home feature mean? It >>> would be more comprehensive toward those who are not software >>> expert but do want to contribute. Thank you. Regards, Nevio >> >> "Dial home" or "phone home" is a euphimism from the movie ET. It >> refers to software that "checks in" periodically with the software >> devolper. Many people consider phone home implementations not to be >> features so much as spyware. > > When software phones home to give the folks at home information about > the computer doing the phoning, that's spyware. We're talking about > software that phones home and asks if there's anything new that it might > want. Or at least that's what it sounds like to me. Two totally > different things. No one has suggested MediaWiki software phone home and > give anyone any information (other than what might show up in an httpd > log). Just make it something that can be turned off for the really > paranoid types. > > On the other hand, I'm pretty paranoid when it comes to "automatic > updates" of things like this. I like to have the old code base that I > can switch back to if anything goes wrong -- and things DO go wrong. >
Just reminding everyone that there's this awesome free encyclopedia out there with an article on the subject. ;-) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoning_home> (Though everyone's given great answers already!) -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
