from Hacker News

Moq – Privacy issues with SponsorLink, starting from version 4.20

by DishyDev on 8/9/23, 1:37 PM with 4 comments

  • by tailspin2019 on 8/9/23, 2:51 PM

    As a long time user of Moq, I’m horrified by this. I think the author has now reverted this but I’ll be moving away from this library anyway.

    I’ll also be reevaluating all my Nuget dependencies and their potential security risks (so indirectly, one good thing I guess).

    Reading all the comments on GitHub though, I’ve got to feel for the dev a bit - he has half the .NET community all piling on after years of his hard work likely being under appreciated (as is often the case with OSS developers).

    He’s made a big misstep with this, and broken a lot of trust, but it genuinely doesn’t look like malice - rather just (really) terrible judgement.

    Not excusing his mistake, but wow, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of all that anger.

    Personally I feel there is a limit to how angry I’m entitled to be after years of benefitting from this guys work without paying him a penny.

    It’s really just a sad situation all round.

    Edit: more info on the dev’s reasoning behind this change in his original blog post from January:

    https://www.cazzulino.com/sponsorlink.html

  • by minajevs on 8/9/23, 2:01 PM

    Library author decisions aside, the implications for the .NET ecosystem are insane.

    .NET Analyzers spawning processes, especially in an elevated environment. Pausing builds for 100ms for non-paying users. Silently leaking millions of user emails.

    That all seems much dirtier than core-js drama.