Gnome Keyring sources of confusion, frustration

[Neal McBurnett]

Ignoring for the moment the highly inappropriate means of communicating from WrogerWroger, I found some kernels of interesting truth in what he wrote about Gnome Keyring, worthy of followup.

It seems to me that it all started with an understandable frustration with how Gnome Keyring behaves in the face of some non-default settings and/or ill-behaved applications.  It can insistently demand attention and demand that you enter your password, without telling you why, or even which application is asking you to enter your password.  I have the same frustration.  It can be scary!

I don't see that it has been discussed here, at least recently, and I dug into it a bit, and found a perfectly rational discussion here:

 Bug 574315 – "Unlock Private Key" dialog mysteriously refers to "an application"
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574315

 Projects/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy - GNOME Wiki!
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy

The bottom line is that there are flaws in Linux desktop security, and when combined with the Gnome Keyring "no security theater" philosophy, the system doesn't pretend to know for sure which application is asking for your password, so it is hard to figure out how to get the prompts to go away without actually giving your password away to an unknown application.

Or something like that.  And there are other confusing aspects of the user experience which could probably be better documented.

I think it would be helpful to take a look at the behavior and documentation and see if there is a way to clarify all this for users in hopes that fewer of them will start down the path that can lead to invoking the Nazis.  After all, that sort of escalation is common enough that it has a name and a wikipedia page:

 Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

E.g. would it be appropriate to make it more easy for users to find explanations for some of the confusing aspects of gnome keyring, and make sure those explanations are as helpful as we can manage?

Does anyone have some good pointers to places this sort of thing has been discussed before, here, or in other Ubuntu or Gnome contexts?
Are there concrete, reasonable proposals for improvement that just need to be written up or implemented?

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

Re: WrogerWroger post with Subject:  ...... "the Ubuntu community"

On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 04:18:51PM +0100, Tom Davies wrote:
Subject: Re: Yesterdays spammer
> Hi :)
> Nicely done! :)  I agree about the black-listing.  I actually read quite a lot
> of his blog post and it doesn't make sense. 
> 
> It would be normal for an odd person here or there to have a gripe about the
> odd thing or 2.  As i said yday we can't all be perfect all the time and it's
> quite possible for an odd person or 2 to accidentally find themselves at the
> wrong end of that. 
> 
> Usually it's fairly easy to "turn" such people into prolific and very positive
> contributors to this or other OpenSource projects.  It just takes an apology
> and an attempt to understand what they are saying and then i often find that
> they want the same things that almost everyone in the community wants and that
> their anger was the result of frustration that we aren't all perfect all the
> time and that some things are "works in progress" rather than completed. 
> 
> On the other hand this chap just seems to be really confused and has very messy
> thinking. 
> Regards from
> Tom :) 
> 
> 
> 
> On 11 October 2014 14:45, Svetlana Belkin <belkinsa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
>     On 10/11/2014 09:43 AM, Daniel Doyle wrote:
>     > Just some news to brighten your day, remember the spammer that posted
>     > that link to his blog calling everyone Nazi's? I reported it to Blogger
>     > and now there's a warning screen that you have to confirm before
>     > visiting his blog!
> 
>     He also tried to post to the list again, but it was caught in the
>     moderator side of things and I discarded the message.  I think he should
>     be blacklisted on the admin side of things.
>     --
>     Svetlana Belkin
>     A.K.A: belkinsa
>     User Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/belkinsa