For context on what the Ubuntu Dash actually does and how it's evolving - please see http://blog.canonical.com/2012/12/07/searching-in-the-dash-i...
Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
131–140 of 214 posts
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#132There are two problems with the Ubuntu search box.
1) Not being very clear to your users that the search box is now global and will send information out of the local machine
2) Amazon search sucks.
I haven't used recent versions of Ubuntu, but linking a good distro with the disaster that is Amazon search is not something appealing to me. I don't think it's going to improve my experience on Ubuntu. I strongly feel it's going to make my search experience really sucky.
Note that I am ad-tolerant, and I don't really care about information getting sent off to other servers (so long as I'm told about it before hand) so Canonical have a bit of work to do to persuade me that the new experience is not as awful as Amazon search is on the website.
PS: Apologies to any Amazoners here, but come on, you know the search is terrible, right?
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#133What distro would you recommend take the place of Ubuntu, as a recommended for newbs distro? I mean a distro that you would feel comfortable recommending to a stranger that you will not be able to help install or support the distro, as well as the more traditional "lemme help you with that." As a subset of that, what apt based distro would you recommend for that niche? Is plain Debian really something that people fee…
I hope that my reading of your question as a rhetorical one than a literal one is correct?
Because your entire comment is one big reason I have been rooting for Canonical from day one. I have been on Linux on and off since slackware 1.0, Redhat 5 (5.0 (Hurricane)/5.1 (Manhattan)) all the way to SuSE 7.0 and not one time was I able to get someone (anyone) to adopt it completely -- despite all my handholding and regular support! Finally resorted to recommending Cygwin as an alternative, and I was still called upon to help with "things" ;-)
The first/only time I managed to get a successful switch and retain, was when I recommended Ubuntu.
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#134A lot of people are pointing out that if you do not like something, don't use it. It's simple enough, and have a "sounds right" tone to it. As an implied statement with this, anyone complaining should just shut up then. This is a rather crazy line of thought once one actually starts to think about it. If I see a poisonous (say rotten) food being sold, I find it almost my duty to inform people. Somehow it's now being…
This is a great example of how nothing is free. Linux isn't free, not only does it cost time, it costs privacy. I do enjoy playing with it, so the first cost is meaningless to me, but the second absolutely is not. Frankly, Ubuntu is mismanaged. From the absurd new UI to a built-in privacy trojan? I'd rather just pay for an OS that doesn't hate me or use a different distro. Not sure what the allure of Ubuntu is at thi…
"I'd rather just pay for an OS that doesn't hate me..."
I am not aware of a "for pay" consumer OS that wouldn't make Ubuntu's intrusion look positively benign by comparison. You're getting hammered because you took your argument overboard there. It also doesn't help that you said "Linux" instead of "Ubuntu".
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#135A lot of people are pointing out that if you do not like something, don't use it. It's simple enough, and have a "sounds right" tone to it. As an implied statement with this, anyone complaining should just shut up then. This is a rather crazy line of thought once one actually starts to think about it. If I see a poisonous (say rotten) food being sold, I find it almost my duty to inform people. Somehow it's now being…
If anybody says you should just be quiet and not use what you don't like, tell them that they should just be quiet and not read what they don't like.
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#136Do people using Ubuntu not also use web browsers? If so, then they are also being spied on by others such as google, amazon, facebook, twitter - every time they use one of their sites. I just find it overly dramatic to be focusing on this one point of Ubuntu's search being harvested for keywords when this sort of thing is commonplace on the web. At least with Ubuntu you have the option to turn it off.
The answer is yes, people who use shit like google/facebook is being spied.
The problem is, traditionally, people who used Linux know how to deal with these things (eg: use StartPage instead of google, use a shared IP, etc). But having to fight your own distro of choice is a different matter. This shouldn't be happening. As much as I loved Ubuntu, now I'm already testing other distros to make the switch.
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#137I'd guess that the only way to really dislodge the Amazon widget would be to make sure it remains unprofitable. If it remains a major talking point and doesn't pull in enough money to compensate for its negative effect on community evangelism, it won't last long. I have mixed feelings about the new system. On the one hand, I respect a lot of what Canonical is doing with linux regarding mainstreaming, streamlining, an…
http://catb.org/jargon/html/O/on-the-gripping-hand.html
Just enforcing the lore
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#138Canonical is not the first to do this. And nobody minded. In Chrome, every time you start to type a URL, it tries to autocomplete. One source of autocompletions is that it contacts Google, which sends back suggestions. Therefore by default Google knows every search you do in Chrome, even if you didn't want to go to Google. (They turn this off for incognito mode.) I don't know how long this has been the case for Chrom…
I also enabled instant search in Chrome. Whenever I want privacy, I just Ctrl-N.
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, while I generally agree with rms, in this particular situation I think he went overboard. Not in expressing his opinion, but in the way he did it. I say this as a free software advocate; this situation arises from a sad reality, and one that rms doesn't even address: it's really hard to make money from free software. I don't think Mark Shuttleworth was enthusiastic about sending users' information, the de…
I think RMS's stance is by definition always the extreme. He sees these things in black and white, so there's no degrees of compromise. If software phones home with private information without the users explicit consent, it's against his principles, period. And I think that's an excellent position to have, which is not to say you're not right either--making money is an important and difficult aspect of FOSS. But the…
He kind of already has given ground, saying Steam on Linux is borderline acceptable at times.
Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who really wants commercial results built into their desktop? The distinction between the desktop and the Internet is going away. Some argue that "the desktop is dead"; I just think that it'll get more integrated. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, providing that you have adequate control over your own privacy settings and have a choice of providers (both large and small). An open source project th…
In fact it turns out that 12.04 has some lens making queries to different services when I was searching stuff using the dash, and I didn't know about it. I fixed it with: sudo apt-get remove unity-scope-musicstores unity-lens-video unity-lens-music (I couldn't find how to disable it) It's not like I agreed to this when I installed the system, because I upgraded from a previous version (and a previous version, etc), a…
You can disable it via the GUI in the Privacy settings: http://askubuntu.com/a/192270/235