> The part that I find more interesting is the "emergent evil" thing. > Somehow the techies found that it is OK to do that and they did, > in the best of their intentions.
I'm not surprised: it's quite common to want to get some kind of information about how your program performs (i.e. things like profiling your code), and it's often hard to get a good view of that with artificial local tests, so there's a strong motivation to try and do that profiling on "in real life". Emacs's tradition is to be quite conservative when it comes to initiating network connections, but nowadays many if not most applications have some kind of "call home" functionality (e.g. to check if there's a more recent release). It's absurdly considered normal. Stefan