Thoughts on advertisements in Ubuntu 12.10

[Russell McOrmond]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre
<mathieu.tl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't know about stuff being sent
> from their systems, and don't care, trusting developers to Do The
> Right Thing (tm) and not expose them to privacy or security issues.

  I don't think this is a "Right Thing", and it does go to a question
of trustworthiness of Canonical.

  While agree with you on the "dont know", I disagree with your
evaluation of "don't care".    I see this in politics all the time: I
consider the pretty mainstream concern about network neutrality, but
less mainstream concern about non-owner locks on our devices as part
of "DRM", to be one of those cases where people express concern where
understanding the threat requires less technical knowledge.


  Add on top of that that most people don't understand the level of
trust that they give to their chosen software vendors.

  In the comments some people questioned the suggestion that Canonical
effectively had root on every Ubuntu system.   This should be obvious:
apt-get runs as root, and thus a package (installer or binary, doesn't
matter) can do anything that root can do.  There are people who are
techie enough to be interested in that blog article who hadn't
realized that.

  The ability to scrutinize packages after-the-fact is there, so it
has a type of "Access to Information" attached to it to enable
accountability and transparency.   This will be much harder for this
external search where not only is the search engine getting additional
data, but so is Canonical.


  Ubuntu will still be fine for me as I can remove this "feature"
which I don't see any value in.  I still don't see it as a good choice
for less technical users who can't as easily evaluate for themselves
whether this is a "Right Thing" for them.

-- 
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>

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