The Dash Is Now Anonymized In Ubuntu 13.10

Last year, Canonical drew heat for the troublesome privacy implications that people like Richard Stallman saw in its in-built search-and-shopping facilities. An anonymous reader now writes "Long story short — Canonical now makes the user's data anonymous."

Comments

And then I got my eyes tested.

[Joining Yet Again]

typing a word in the Dash, pushes the word against (along with the locally-installed scopes) the Canonical servers, the Canonical servers decide the best results, the results are then anonymized and finally landed in the Dash.

The fuck? If you can't see any privacy implications here, you're a dilettante.

And anonymisation of results - what? If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.

Re:And then I got my eyes tested.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fuck? If you can't see any privacy implications here, you're a dilettante.

This statement might carry a bit more weight if your standard garden-variety Slashdot reader didn't see privacy implications in bowls of alphabet soup.

Re:And then I got my eyes tested.

[Joining Yet Again]

Can you give an example of where a standard garden-variety Slashdot reader has incorrectly read privacy implications into something?

Ignore anyone who uses either the term "New World Order" or "reptilian".

No more privacy = anonymous??

[Gothmolly]

Care to rephrase that, smitty?

Re:I don't get it

[hedwards]

The difference is that anonymity means they can still collect all your information, just not your identity. So, you're just one breech away from having all of your information spilled to them. What's more, when it comes to online services and such, the name isn't usually that important, they don't really know that my name is Sir Dragon King of the 4th order of New Castle.

Just because one is anonymous, does not mean that one has privacy, when I go out in public, I'm anonymous, but people can see everything that I do.

Re:Ubuntu is a has-been.

[elashish14]

You're right on 3, but

1) Many applications run faster on Ubuntu (and Linux in general), Steam for example. I've noticed Linux on my personal machine to be much faster than the Windows machines I've had to fix.
2) I've consistently seen Windows gag on many routine operations. I/O responsiveness on Linux is far more robust than on Windows. Flash causes the entire system to grind to a halt on Windows whereas Linux is still responsive enough to execute a killall plugin-container. Libreoffice on Linux just loads, whereas on Windows it causes the system to hang for several seconds while the libraries are loaded.
4) You may be right on this one as well, but Linux has several APIs and toolkits for all sorts of things - window toolkits, networking, and so on.... The only area where you're probably right on this one is stability in the graphics space.

Don't get me wrong, I doubt that desktop GNU/Linux will ever dominate the marketplace, but it's definitely not because of the technical merits of either platform - Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows, and always will be. Linux developers focus on making a good product; Microsoft is more of a marketing/legal company in the tech industry (a la Apple, Oracle), and they focus more of their efforts on licensing, lock-in/out, and general marketing than developing their core product. People don't have to choose Windows (from a technical standpoint) generally don't but Microsoft rarely gives them a choice.