Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

fsf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 214 posts

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#151

Post by keithpeter »

DanBC wrote: post #141
belorn wrote: post #59

A 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…

> Imagine a worker at a company, using this function to search for internal document including a string with company secrets. Whooops, now that data is at Amazon. Some people used to say that you should not search for domain names at Google, because then Google would have the name and someone in Google could snatch it and squat it and you'd lose out. That's a paranoid extreme, but you get the idea. Some things are re…

Canonical people are posting here, so perhaps they can say if future versions of the Business Desktop Remix will have the search feature enabled by default in countries with a local Amazon store.

The current Business Desktop Remix is 12.04 which pre-dates the issue.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#152

Post by Surio »

snip

Even in arguments around copyright law (like this recently concluded debate... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4882364) the general consensus seems to flow around comments such as "... was not trying to reignite the Great Internet Copyright Argument for the millionth time, and instead was making a point about what was politically actionable today"

On similar lines, why not acknowledge the reality of running a viable, commercial venture around FOSS by tapping viable revenue models?

A few others have written some very good points that I really enjoyed reading. Here they are (in no particular order of preference):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887261

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887132

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887365

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887294 (I really hope that comment was rhetorical rather than being literal)

that makes the point of why the situation is much more nuanced for someone like Canonical. And if Linux adoption has to succeed big time, we need the Canonicals and Mints (with their warts and all) that give the general public a viable alternative. Mandriva Linux was facing bankruptcy a few years ago, if I am not mistaken.

EDIT: For the opt-in vs opt-out discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864783

The difference is that - for a chunk of people - this functionality isn't crap. It's actually useful. It's out of the way for people who don't care. It's there for people who do. I've seen folk go "that's so cool" when the amazon stuff came up. This stuff is much closer to the adds folk get in Google search. It's often relevant to what they're doing at the time. (anecdata, sure. happens to match mine ;-) )

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#153

Post by Kliment »

curiousdannii wrote: post #56
justinf wrote: post #18

I'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…

Amazon postage is prohibitively expensive for those outside the US (except perhaps for those who live in another country where Amazon is based?) The only time I'd ever use Amazon is if I'm after an old rare book which is out of print and Amazon is the only place I can find a second hand copy. And in those times I'd actually be deliberately searching for it, checking many sites in my browser, not casually using Unity!

If you ever need anything that can be sourced from German Amazon, poke me and I'll get it for you and mail it on. I'm Kliment on freenode IRC.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#154

Post by TallGuyShort »

k3n wrote: post #143
TallGuyShort wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall complaining vocally about that and seeing others do so. It's still the only reason I don't use Chrome.

Well, you _can_ disable it, so no need to cut off your nose to spite your face. Unless you're boycotting Chrome on the principle of this feature.

I'm kind of boycotting on pricinple. I recognize that Google has an on-going interest in that kind of practice, and I don't want to deal with it in the future. If a key benefit of open-source is more-eyes-on-the-code, there's another browser that has more-eyes-with-the-same-priorities-as-me on the code.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#155

Post by yungchin »

drcube wrote: post #124
yungchin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's somewhat less of a privacy violation, because you usually expect to send out the URL you type over the internet. That's different from trying a local search on your machine and finding it ended up on the internet.

No, you only expect it to send the URL when you hit "enter". For instant results, however, it must send each character typed to Google. Also, when I type a non-google URL into my address bar, I don't expect Google to be notified. As it is, they can track all your internet travels from Chrome, and I don't like it. Hence why I use Firefox and Duck Duck Go.

You're absolutely right, that's why I wrote "somewhat less".

It's happened to me more than once that I accidentally pasted a password into the Chrome bar so that I had to go and change it, and so like you, I much prefer having an address bar without function creep. All I meant is that the potential for much worse privacy leaks is much much greater with the Unity bar than with the Chrome bar.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#156

Post by niels_olson »

acabal wrote: post #123
Shamanmuni wrote: post #115

Earlier 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…

Agreed, RMS essentially has as his sole professional obligation to the community to explore, stake out, and shine a light on a very deontologic position. It is a lonely camp and it wouldn't hurt us to put some rice in his bowl.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#157

Post by reidrac »

jcastro wrote: post #140
reidrac wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I said 12.04 and not 12.10. There's no way of disabling the lens I removed in 12.04 (may be because they got introduced in that release).

EDIT: at least I couldn't find a way to disable them. Nothing in privacy settings and nothing with dconf-editor.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#158

Post by takluyver »

rlpb wrote: post #95
takluyver wrote: post #81

Relevant: Canonical have just said there will be more retailers integrated in 13.04 (which was always expected). And: "We are also testing a few additional user controls like filters for local and global searching – more to come on this front as we learn from those sessions." http://blog.canonical.com/2012/12/07/searching-in-the-dash-i...

"...we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings."

That bit's not new, though - the toggle is already in place, and I have used it.

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#159

Post by mcantelon »

rlpb wrote: post #8

"When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers." That's not how I see it. I'd correct this to "When the user performs a global search for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers to perform that search". If a user wants to search his own local files without searching the entire I…

>"People will certainly make a modified version of Ubuntu without this surveillance."

I've been using Cinnamon, Mint Linux's alternative to Unity, and I find it's Dash-like launcher works better anyway. Using Cinnamon also, strangely, fixed an audio issue I'd been too lazy to troubleshoot.

http://www.itworld.com/software/307138/install-cinnamon-desk...

Re: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

#160

Post by takluyver »

zurn wrote: post #128
takluyver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, Amazon has national sites covering North America, most of Europe, Brazil, Japan & China. That's a pretty substantial slice of the world's population.

Only a handful of European countries: Germany, UK, France, Italy I think. That's 15.2% of Europe by area.

But probably rather more by population. Also, I'd guess that at least some of the other countries get reasonably cheap shipping from those sites.
Post reply on HN