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Shuttleworth: Trust Us, We're Trying to Make Shopping Better
An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post responding to the latest controversy over Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth says 'integrating online scope results' are 'not putting ads in Ubuntu' because the shopping results 'are not paid placement', but 'straightforward search results'. He goes on to explain his plans to make the Home Lens of the Dash a place to find 'anything anywhere'. Like a cross between Chrome OS's new app launcher, Siri and Google Now 'it will get smarter and smarter' so you can 'ask for whatever you want' it 'just works'."
And here I thought the ones that don't care about their privacy or workflow were using Windows.
This is just a moneymaking scheme.
We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage” Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.
Cool, thanks for at least being honesty about that part. Although I don't understand why this wasn't the front-and-center thesis of your blog post. You're getting paid to bring us to Amazon faster. Okay. You can opt out of it but it's enabled by default. Okay. I get that. It's okay, nobody's going to fault you if you're trying to figure out new revenue models. But you should really be up front with your user base about it or you're going to get some seriously knee jerk reactions that might doom your product before it's out the door (regardless of how true it is). You're running damage control now and that probably could have been avoided if your floated this out in front of "leaked" screenshots.
I'm also really curious about this next part of your answer to this question:
But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.
So what happens when it's time to integrate and "bring the user faster" to Barnes & Noble? What happens when you've "integrated" with both Amazon, B&N, Abe's Books, eBay, Go Hastings, etc and I type in "Ender's Game"? What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu? I have reservations that this move is making an already omnipotent Amazon unduly more powerful ...
My work here is dung.
Why can't you just integrate Google search into the lens?
And THIS is modded funny? Stay classy slashdot. But in reality Microsoft always asks when they want to collect some anonymous data and it's always opt-in. With Google they outright collect and you have to know where to opt-out (if you even can).
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/04/26/1740234/steve-jobs-idea-for-an-ad-supported-os , but I'm sure Apple has found a way to use subliminal messages instead, considering how many people are buying new iPhones.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
...so many other things that need fixing, and they're whacking off about internet search.
If I want to search the internet, I pull up google and search. That crap has no business on my desktop
As long as it's not pushing forced ads, I have no problem with Ubuntu setting up a shopping network and app sales.
They have to make money somehow and this seems like one of the less offensive services they could implement.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion. It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux. But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off. I understand that this is still beta, and it's certainly not LTS so it is more or less a testing platform, so I'm not jumping up and down right now. Canonical have proven to me that they can iron things out between normal releases and LTS, and I'm happy to accept that this may well be the case here. I'm basing this on evidence that I have seen over the last 4 years, not just what Mark says. This really is a great step forward for UX, as it is saying "hey, let's do more 'cloud' stuff from the desktop." Think about what else will be possible with a bit of thought. We could have it bring up all of your photos, from all sources (picassa, facebook, twitter) and present them in one place. I could type something like "London" into my dash and it shows me all the photos I've taken in London, a list of all my friends who are currently *in* London, and maybe sell me a London guide book. I cannot begin to express how awesome features like this can be. Amazon is only a single step to a full set of amazing features, and we must remember that these aren't *ads.* I am searching for a product, I can chose to buy it, and I won't get prompted to buy anything similar next time I fire up the dash. One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea. However, if I were to install this on my Dad's laptop tomorrow, I can guarantee he would actually be quite thrilled with this feature. This is Linux for Human Beings and I think product searching is a very human thing to have.
And once adult oriented results while be filtered, someone will ask to remove blasphematory results ( like India/Pakistan ), then someone will remove gay related content ( if this isn't already removed as "adult oriented result", as often with such filter ), then someone will remove violent game ( like in australia ),then users will also ask to not see song they already purchased songs from the result, and then RIAA will ask to not show pirate song and mp3.
And then Canonical will be screwed to have deployed a censorship system, because it will be abused like the others. in the end, Canonical will not enven get enough money just to pay the system, let alone engineers to make new products.
Some people are also questioning if the home lens (the default lens to make any local search) is the right place to integrate these remote searches to third party services. In theory, amazon could gather information about every file you search, every program you launch through the lens, and such. There is even a bug report, marked as confirmed, questioning this very thing.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
It would, but it would be a pale shadow of its current self. Sure it'd survive on servers and in the mobile space, but the desktop would be even tinier. What would Valve do, shift their target to Fedora? Which is even less end-user targeted than Ubuntu?
Ubuntu was at one time an appealing alternative to Windows. I had it running on a desktop and laptop at home, and at least one VM at work ran Ubuntu. It just worked. But the minute they came up with this Unity dashboard thing, it broke the familiar UI and as far as I'm concerned, tweaking Ubuntu to make it usable again to myself and my users became more effort than it was worth.
Meanwhile, Suse has plowed ahead with a record of pretty consistent, solid distributions. Fedora's been pretty good as well, but once I got Suse I just got used to the Suse way of doing things and didn't look back.
Yeah, I miss how Ubuntu can locate printers very reliably on the network, while I have to manually plug in the IP addresses in YaST, but that's not a show stopper. What is a showstopper is when I can't find basic stuff like the calculator because it's been moved from a simple accessories pulldown menu and hidden in some goofy app picker.
This ad thing is merely more fuel on the fire. I don't get what those people are thinking. I guess they have to keep pushing the envelope, looking for ways to monetize their product and keep growing, but I would have thought they'd do better by just making it the easiest and most affordable alternative there is to Windows. Anyway -- R.I.P. Ubuntu!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
... as in an application/add on/option type of functionality. And to increase interest, not that google general search results always find what you want, provide the users with easy to use filtering.... so if they boycott a company, they don't have to see their ads when searching.
Apart from what's already been mentioned here, one bit particularly troubles me:
I don't equate having root with having people's data, personally. I happen to adhere to a Ethics Code (SAGE's) that *keeps* me from peeking over people's personal data, *especially* for my own interests. Adding a snitch that report back not only the machine's existence (you get that through APT automated updates) but also personal search requests to Canonical headquarters by default does seem like a major privacy breach.
That the dictator of Ubuntu and Canonical brushes his responsibilities aside like this is downright scary if you ask me, especially given the argument is "we have root, we 0wn you already, sorry bud".
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
A very miniscule proportion of what attracts Valve to Ubuntu has anything to do with what Canonical has done. Like any other distribution, Ubuntu is the combination of a number of upstream projects. Canonical really gets much more than it gives in this respect.
What Canonical does is mainly configuration management and that it tends to do poorly. They already have a bad reputation for pushing out versions before they're ready or making other bad decisions.
The fact that they've decided to put on the afterburners after having jumped the shark is really no surprise to anyone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Every time you search for a local file on your computer, the details of that search will be transmitted to a third party cloud service. That is a huge potential privacy issue regardless of who that service is. Worse, they they don't even make their users aware of this fact, which is completely unacceptable. That Canonical still doesn't understand this after being having it brought to their attention means they clearly cannot be trusted to assemble a secure Linux distribution.
Funny, I'm using a stock desktop install (which I assume uses network manager) with the only extra packages at this point being kde-full, SSH, aptitude, nmap, and htop.
I can ssh in before logging in with any user, am i to assume this is before the networking starts, or that you are wrong about the implication?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
India has never asked for a law against blasphemy in the UN, unlike Pakistan. Please don’t lump India in with the failed state it is forced to live next to.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
I might find this useful if I could choose which retailers to include or exclude. No NewEgg? Add it. Don't like Amazon? Delete it.
Someone (not google, apple nor microsoft) should act as a clearing house for payment for these custom searches as these very "well-qualified sales leads" are much more valuable to a retailer than random Ubuntu-sent queries through a private Amazon acting as a commercial clearinghouse.
IMHO and YMMV