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Please disable 'Perform DNS lookups to check if URLs are valid?' by default

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Detailed steps to reproduce the problem:

  1. Install iTerm
  2. Hover on things that remotely resemble URLs and touch Cmd
  3. Watch iTerm leak things in plain text over DNS

What happened: iTerm sent various things (including passwords) in plain text to my ISP's DNS server

What should have happened: iTerm should not have done that

I monitored my DNS traffic for a while, and I kept noticing lookups that made no sense, for things that had been printed to my terminal. Initially I blamed bash-completion, but when I noticed it also happened for remote ssh sessions, it became obvious that iTerm2 was to blame. A coworker then found #3688 (closed) and #5303 (closed). I immediately disabled this feature.

Having this feature on by default is a terrible security and privacy risk. Please disable it by default. I personally never even noticed the blue vs. white on clickable links, which suggests (n=1) that usability will not be reduced that much by setting this feature disabled by default.

And, to stress the impact, in the act of selecting text and Cmd-C'ing it to Copy, it is very easy to trigger this for passwords (for example, when I generate them using pwgen).

Edited by Peter van Dijk