Why is it that many highly respected promoter any one particular tech thing goes “eccentric” after a certain number of years of fame and/or fortune? First I heard was Howard Hughes, but in recent years I hear Bezos, Zuckerberg, Branson, Stallman, Musk, and recently read Torvalds in the news. Is it a “It’s good to be king.” syndrome?
In many cases it’s more something like 'I have f*ck-you money now so i don’t care what people think anymore’¸ they were alway eccentric but more subdued about it.
(not sure this is true of Stallman in particular though)
I was thinking more like the Mel Brooks scene.
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Noting from that article (slightly out of date Ubuntu version means that it does not work exactly as described in that article) that you can
vi /etc/default/motd-news
ENABLED=0
Job done.
It’s not great that it defaults to leaking the information described. However they have explicitly given you a supported means of disabling this specific component of the MOTD.
Adding: The comments also note that you can replace their MOTD server with your own, which may be useful functionality in some environments.
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If you allow Ubuntu to download or even just check for software updates - which pretty much you do want to do! - then you are leaking a certain amount of information anyway.
That would apply to many distros.
I would argue that a “leak” is unexpected behavior and doesn’t apply to these.
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I don’t see how Cononical can get away with any secret spying. Canonical seems to be no different than Google, except that Cononical doesn’t steal as much information from you as Google does. But they are both theives to some degree. Cononical’s integrity seems to be irrevocably lost if they got caught doing any spying at all, especially for the purposes of selling the information. If it came out that one of the major banks was caught stealing money by deducting small amounts of money from the accounts of its account holders, the attitude wouldn’t be “Oops, my bad. We will steal less and try not to get caught in the future”. It would be game over for them and there would be some kind of a punative cost that is big enough to provide a credible deterance against their doing it ever again. Would you rather do business with a very effective and successful business partner who cheats you every once in a while when he thinks you,re not watching, or an honest partner who is not as successful as the partner who cheats you. Information is money. And theft is theft. Even if you get your Ubuntu OS for free, that doesn’t mean that the secret spying on you isn’t theft.
I would rather pay a subscription fee to a company like Cononical (but not to Cononical now), then to knowingly allow them to violate my trust. When a company like Cononical steals information from you without being up-front about what you are actually paying for their OS, they are actually worse than Google who makes it clear that their price for your use of their service, is their access to your information. Cononical has broken a sacred trust. I plan to replace my Ubuntu OS with some other OS the next time I install an OS. Hopefully enough other people will do the same. We’ve got one more reason now to go with PureOS.
And in response to the person who says that they weren’t affected by Cononical’s spying, just because the thief didn’t steal from you this time, doesn’t mean that they won’t steal from you in the future. This has everything to do with the integrity of who you’re doing business with and not about how to stop them from stealing from you or theoretically, how someone who was stolen from could have prevented being stolen from, in retrospect.
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Yes, fair enough, it’s easy enough to disable. I don’t think it’s too bad either, but I just didn’t like things akin to fetching advertising in a motd.
This can be somewhat avoided by setting a local apt mirror, shared by multiple machines. Also you control when you do updates, you could wait until you are on a trusted network. That said, yes that is indeed not specific to Ubuntu.
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um ? CentOS ? 
Power management is broken on last CentOS. CPU works under 3.1 GHz all the time and makes scary sounds (squeak).
Debian with backported Mesa 20 is best option, but Mesa 20 doesn’t compile under Debian. I tried many versions of Mesa starting from 19 and just can’t get it work.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims? Not for what I specifically quotes here but foe your claims against Canonical. If they are true it is important for others to know.
Because comments like this:
make me think you need to loosen your tin foil hat, because it seems to be cutting off circulation.
I mean really, how can you be secretly spied on, if the only parts of Ubuntu that you have to use are all open source?
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“Overt” spying then. By the “least intrusive means”, is usually how it is worded.
If you read Richard Stallman’s article linked to near the top of this thread, you’ll see that Cononical has code running in Ubuntu that collects your personal information from network searches to make it possible for Amazon to advertise to you. The fact that the information is used in aggregate and is not given to Amazon is irrelevant. If a bank were to steal ten cents from each of millions of customers, that small theft from many would still be called theft. Cononical’s malicious code is wholly unacceptable because of what it does, not because of how much it steals. I trust what Richard Stallman wrote. No tin hat is required.
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@StevenR - As you say - searches on a local computer was sent to canonical, and amazon - This problem has been fixed so that it isn’t done by default, so the problem is mitigated. BUT, it says a whole lot that Canonical would enable this by default, even if they changed it after.
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Exactly, Cononical changed the default ‘theft mode’ to be opt-in instead, because they got caught and because getting caught makes them look bad. Where is Cononical’s apology announcement that promises that they will never do it again? In the absence of such an apology announcement that tells us that they do not believe in doing business this way, you know they’re going to do it again. As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu (even as good as it is) is a poisoned operating system. The ethics of its creators are flawed. The kernel itself might just as well have technical flaws. The result is the same to me because the reliability is proven to be low in features that I care about.
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Sounds like the Pope saying his statements are infallible but abrogated by some other Pope generations later. (Implied Canonical pun intended but that would really take a church council, like one at Nicea in 325.)
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Hmmm, that does suck. I agree with you that it seems they got caught and this prompted a course correction. But wouldn’t this be the protection of Open Source in action? And therefore, wouldn’t my question still stand? How could they steal if the code letting them do so is transparent to the user?
I think they have every right to try to generate revenue for their efforts, but think that there are ways to do that which don’t require unethical actions. The way Elementary OS does not provide a download link until a donation has been made for example, is one way to do more than just suggest it would be a good idea to donate for the software.
Maybe I’ll give Pop OS another shot.
Regarding Mr. Stallman, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Yes, Cononical does have a right to make a profit, just as much as Purism does. But notice the differences in the business models of those two companies. Actually, Google is more honest than Cononical is. If you agree to see a prostitute and pay their price, you can"t blame them. Cononical was not as honest. With Google, I don’t like them because they extort me. If I don’t agree to give up my privacy, I can’t use many of my phone’s features. I wish I could trust them enough and if they would let me pay their price in cash instead. This extortion model is terrible. But at least the relationship is honest. They’re not sneaking anything in while my defenses are down as Cononical did in this case because I have agreed to allow them to do it. In business, just because you take advantage of someone less sophisticated than you are, doesn’t make it right. Personally, I don’t review the source code for every program that I use. But until now, I just trusted Cononical. I really wouldn’t mind paying a monthly subscription fee if necessary, to gain full privacy. But Cononical won’t offer those terms either. I pay way too much by allowing the ads and snooping. I’ll look in to Elementary OS.
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I think you might be missing the bigger picture with Canonical. They are an important part of the Debian stack. They have in many cases, nearly single handedly, advanced the Linux desktop. How many distros rely on what Canonical does? This is a large network of checks and balances.
And given what open source is supposed to do for privacy and security, I’d say this snafu with Canonical is a chink in those supposed virtues.
How did the legion of distros dependent on Ubuntu not notice Amazon backdoor action?
Sorry I still don’t see a reason not to trust Canonical. To not trust this is to not trust open source ideology.
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proof that only a Pope can kick another Pope’s ass 
… if anybody else does that then it’s a sin. conclusion > if you want to refute what the Pope says you better BECOME the Pope yourself 
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