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Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth Wins Austria's Big Brother Award
sfcrazy writes "Austria's Big Brother Awards awarded the coveted Big Brother Award to Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu Dash's privacy reducing online extensions to local searches."
From the article: "What’s bad here and raises question here is that despite repeated requests Canonical refused to make the tracking option opt-in. The feature is installed and enabled by default so the moment one install Ubuntu it starts sending info to Canonical servers until the user deliberately disables it."
If that is the biggest brother in Austria, they are living in paradise.
Most people within core mass market demographics don't realize or care how much data they send, so defaults are important economically. If the financial motivations are in the wrong place, the wrong decision will be made for invested parties. I don't know of any business that is successful and doesn't exploit this general sort of opportunity. It paints Ubuntu as a villain, but its more business as usual and isn't unique to Ubuntu.
Overclockers
Well, he certainly earned it ... now can we have a "biggest asshole in Linux" award? He's a shoe-in for that too.
'We' don't care if other people adopt it on the desktop.
We do care when someone tries to turn Linux into a douche-bag, spy on everything you do thing so Shuttleworth can get more ad revenue. Fuck him.
And, I'm afraid I would never use Canonical ever again.
I can think of someone more deserving.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Because, of all the privacy violators made apparent in the past several months, Canonical is clearly the worst offender.
FWIW, I don't think Unity has done much to improve the desktop experience, though that is somewhat a matter of taste.
Canonical marketed Linux to the extent that Ubuntu was tracking higher as a keyword in searches than Linux.
I'd like to thank the KDE devs however for making Linux usable on the desktop.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
They are talking about typing something into a field labeled "Search your computer and online sources. I repeat: "SEARCH YOUR COMPUTER AND ONLINE SOURCES" (caps seems to be necessary).
Besides that, you can very easily enable/disable sources (by clicking them in the same dash), completely remove sources with your package manager, or disable all online searches.
But, why in Kropotkinsname would anyone want to disable the online search? If you want to get the weather, calculation, wikipedia page, wouldn't you just lookup the result on the web instead? Or even worse: search it with Google?
Oh, right. Newspeak.
Not just usable in the HMI sense, but usable because it's solid. Unity is a slow, crashy disaster, and even though I can tolerate Gnome Shell, it's just too unstable to use for real work, with daily crashes. Although these are generally non-fatal, they tend to leave things in a 'not quite right' state. Even the very latest KDE tends to be very fast and very solid these days.
Just like Google - YOU are the product, not the search (or other) services.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Ok, how do you think they can sustain the operation and remain 'free' then?
Then what is left for Obama? Big Grandfather? And there is a lot of players in the middle ground, (Cameron, Cook, Zuckerberg, Ballmer and a long list of etcs) that are heads and shoulders over whatever Ubuntu could ever do.
Ok, how do you think they can sustain the operation and remain 'free' then?
That's not really our problem, is it?
Other distros doesn't use those tactics and they're doing just fine.
Harshly stated, but in essence, true: Linux has to generate income. Android does it with massive, unavoidable invasion of privacy. Ubuntu does it with a minor, transparent and easily disabled intrusion into some of your online life. It's not like any of us have any real privacy online anymore anyway, so why not let some of the goodies leak to someone actually fdoing something positive with it?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
I haven't checked it out recently, but Ubuntu doesn't necessarily have a reputation for solid bug-free packages that never crash. Ubuntu doesn't have as many engineers, developers or package maintainers as Novell or Red Hat.
Ubuntu's KDE packages were so famously awful that it soured a lot of people who assumed KDE must be buggy and unstable on its own (when openSUSE and Fedora KDE packages are rock solid).
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Let us see how many mod points your friends have today.
There are better candidates for the Big Brother award than Shuttleworth.
soylentnews.org
This surprisingly heavy handed action is why I'll no longer use Ubuntu. Choice is a great thing.
The article blabs on and on about how this is a Big Brother-ish threat because the data could easily be obtained by the NSA. So why not just give the award to the NSA? Or, if it has to be an individual, then to the president or the head of the NSA? I though maybe it had to go to a company operating in the EU, since Canonical is from the UK, but then realized that we know the NSA operates in the EU too. So, maybe the company is being evil by doing this, but clearly not as evil as the US government and its TLAs.
They could just ask people to buy a license... It doesn't have to pirate-proof, just ask for a small payment in exchange for a license key, those who want will pay for it and those who don't want or can't afford will use a pirated key. Way back, I paid for an Opera license even though I could get a free Netscape or IE, because Opera was a much much better product IMO. I also drop some money into buskers' hats when I appreciate their performance, many other people do too. I'd pay for a solid spy-free Ubuntu as well.
We do care when someone tries to turn Linux into a douche-bag, spy on everything you do thing so Shuttleworth can get more ad revenue. Fuck him.
And, I'm afraid I would never use Canonical ever again.
So I'm assuming you also don't use Google either since they have equally turned Linux into a douche-bag, spy on everything you do thing so Google can get more ad revenue.
Linux user here. In my case, I shot myself in the penis. Long story. Anyhow, when life hands you AIDS, make lemonAIDS, as they say. And that's why I'm a linux user.
Let me illustrate what the non-buntu distro users are thinking Ha Ha!/pp.
Debian does it through voluntary donations.
20 years and going.
I don't use Ubuntu as a result of the tracking, but they really couldn't find any product that invades privacy more in 2013? They aren't aware of any websites or applications that silently track users, or any tablet/smarthpone software that accesses private information it shouldn't?
Harshly stated, but in essence, true: Linux has to generate income. Android does it with massive, unavoidable invasion of privacy. Ubuntu does it with a minor, transparent and easily disabled intrusion into some of your online life.
Debian does it with volunteer work where possible, and donations for stuff (e.g. hosting) that needs money.
Arch does it with a similar volunteer/donation scheme.
Uncle Pat does it with stability and simplicity, to the exclusion of modernity (e.g. still no PAM, no sysv init scripts, and you bet your life no systemd/upstart) -- and enough people want this option to remain available that they voluntarily buy CD sets (in lieu of downloading ISOs) or slackware-branded merchandise, in sufficient amounts to pay the bills for Pat.
But yeah, if you're making a distro that doesn't appeal to either the sort of people who can volunteer useful help, or the sort who are willing to donate money (whether structured as a "donation", or as the "purchase" of physical media), I guess maybe you have to hope they're the sort who'll barter away their privacy for software. Since I am the sort who has donated and will continue to donate to projects I'd rather didn't die, I by definition don't care about projects that need to monetize my privacy to continue existing.
Or if you're greedy^Wprofit-oriented, and therefore want more income than people are willing to donate, you might have to seek alternate income sources such as users giving up their privacy. But I don't care about that, because IMO I'm a lot better off using a distro made by people focusing on making a good distro, than one made by people focusing on making a big profit. But what do I know, I'm one of those crazy* right-libertarians who believes the only thing better than a (reasonably small) company, driven to make a good product by competition and the greed/profit motive, is a (reasonably small) co-op, driven to make a good product by the members' individual motive to benefit from the goodness of the product they themselves both make and use.
I believe both preceeding cases describe Canonical, a for-profit company making an OS that's wildly popular with freeloading "end-user" types -- so I don't question the economic sense (for Canonical) of resorting privacy-monetization, and I don't really mind that they and their non-privacy-valuing users make that voluntary trade. OTOH, for the reasons stated, I also don't care whether Canonical disappears from the face of the Earth, so if I find myself, for whatever reason, using an Ubuntu machine, you can bet I'm turning it off.
*craziness measured relative to my fellow US right-libertarians, to most of whom "co-op" is a four-letter word. I have seriously heard the sentence "I can see why you'd want such a thing, but a co-op just feels too socialist for me." Yeah, we're all about the individual liberties, economic freedom of voluntary association, etc., but the moment a few guys want to voluntarily associate into a certain class of organization, without imposing it on anyone else, we knee-jerk and cry "socialist"?! </political-rant>
It comes with a free kangaroo.
Read a bit about dash and what it does and doesn't do. Much as I admire Stallman the man is into some serious polemics (otherwise known as FUD) at times.
For instance read:
http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-extends-unity-dash-search-shrugs-off-criticism-7000021869/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/richard-stallman-calls-ubuntu-spyware-because-it-tracks-searches/
Has Stallman head of Machine Learning and its use to improve search results? How does this occur without training data from actual searches over time? As long as it is anonymized at the recording end I don't have an issue.
The summery is a little bit short, as the article lists more winners than just Shuttleworth/Ubuntu...
Shuttleworth got the price in the category "Communication and Marketing"
"Business and Finance" went to the XBox One for permanent voice and gesture survailance in the livingroom
"Public Offices and Administration" went to the Austrian Attorney General for failing to implement a secure whistleblower platform (storing the data on a rented cloudserver)
"Politics" went to the austrian chancellor and the government as a whole for drawing a vail of silence over the whole NSA affair...
"Global Datahunger" went to the ITU for defining the deep packet inspection requirements in next generation networks.
NSA got covered in the last two prices.
> Ubuntu does it with a minor
So Canonical is completely in the black now? Otherwise your blithering is completely pointless. Shuttleworth has sold out without really actually gaining anything.
Meanwhile, all of the real work is still being done by someone else and whatever money Canonical happens to be making isn't contributing to the overall bottom line.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thank you for today's Linux troll post. It was above-average.
The Ubuntu LTS releases are actually pretty good. Of course it is just a re-presentation of all the work that goes into the Debian project. I don't like where Ubuntu is going with default Window managers. Ubuntu is what got me off of olvwm/enlightenment and onto Gnome 2. Now I use xfce under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and it's perfectly acceptable, and no intrusive Amazon search.
I recall a few years back that they had a LTS release with a beta version of Firefox that was broken, broken Pulse Audio, and even worse, a bad binary blob in the Intel gigabit NIC drivers that would permanently brick your NIC if you loaded the driver.
LTS releases are supported longer, but that doesn't make them more stable on day one. Nor does it change the fact that the packages get the same polish the other fairly bleeding edge Ubuntu releases get.
Red Hat and Debian Stable seem to be overly cautious with sticking with old packages forever for "stability", even if known bugs exist in old packages. Ubuntu is very bleeding edge sometimes at the cost of stability.
I think there needs to be a fairly sane middle ground where each package gets reasonable polish, but you also get newer packages out somewhat quickly. But that takes a lot of package maintainers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
> Ubuntu does it with a minor
Hey, I don't like Ubuntu either, but accusing them of statutory rape seems a little harsh!
You know, the equivalent version of 'pirated software' in the open source world is a fork... That's the exact opposite of what you want.
It isn't like in windows, that every pirated version counts, because world domination & etc...
In open source, the instant you fuck with your users, a fork is made, then, if lucky, community shifts.
See MySQL-MariaDB, Ubuntu - Mint, openOffice - Libreoffice.
And that's also why fedora is a fantastic idea.
They do, on every download.
Ok, how do you think they can sustain the operation and remain 'free' then?
RedHat, SuSE (Novell), Linux Mint, and a whole buttload of other distros have found monetary income w/o resorting to bullshit techniques - why can't Canonical?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I would trust microsoft more than google.
Personally i do not accept default option where Cannonical gets info even on local searches. So i don't use regular Ubuntu. I got couple older laptops that runs light version of Ubuntu.Thank god no mandatory warrant-less searches there. Im all for Cannonical to gain ad-revenue if they need it. But not at expence of them knowing what i search in my local repositories. I do coding sometimes and most of that is done either case by case basis or just for myself. I also have documents that im contractually obliged to keep secret. Do i want someone else to know what i search locally? Hell no. What i don't understand why don't they just ask during a installing system: Would you like to help us spy on you and gain even more advertisement revenue by letting us see everything you search on your computer, over internet or locally?
Wait, if you don't care people adopt it on the desktop, why do you even care that Ubuntu exists? In what way does its existence harm your Linux experience?
I'm pretty sure GNOME shooting itself in the foot has nothing to do with the introduction of Unity.
Upstart did get adopted by Fedora for a while, but that's just Fedora being Fedora (even now it's replaced with homebrewn systemd). I doubt hardcore Linux users were affected; the distros they use didn't adopt them.
If there's anything you might be annoyed with, maybe it's the Eternal September effect: forums getting filled with noob questions who by people don't RTFM, or the pollution of search results of the keyword "linux" with mostly Ubuntu-centric stuff. But a simple google-fu takes care of that.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
They could just ask people to buy a license... It doesn't have to pirate-proof, just ask for a small payment in exchange for a license key, those who want will pay for it and those who don't want or can't afford will use a pirated key. Way back, I paid for an Opera license even though I could get a free Netscape or IE, because Opera was a much much better product IMO. I also drop some money into buskers' hats when I appreciate their performance, many other people do too. I'd pay for a solid spy-free Ubuntu as well.
Trouble is, it (the licence) isn't Canonical's to sell.
They can, however, charge for support, documentation, physical medium (the DVD set), access to their servers for downloading and a whole lot of other things I can't be bothered thinking up. But not for a licence. And if they charge too much for any of those things we can all look forward to the new free (as in beer) Tatmsa 9000 distribution (which will look a lot like Ubuntu).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
Well, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. So one could argue that they can use the work done by Canonical but won't have to pay for it.
Everyone seems to be making a mountain over a mole hill, the Amazon lens for Unity isn't spyware and can be easily turned off in the Settings panel and does not send any information personal to the user, it is fully open-source so you can examine how it works and Canonical tell you it's there... How is this spyware ??? Stop trolling a good Os and just turn it off, or better yet, use Xubuntu where XFCE is the default window manager and stop whining...
> all of the real work is still being done by someone else.
If Canonical weren't doing something then Ubuntu would be Debian. They are adding value, even if it may not be of value to you.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Shuttleworth has said before that Canonical would be in the black if you discount the money they're spending on Touch. The server and OpenStack business is very profitable for them, the desktop business is around break even, and their Touch stuff is very loss-making. In the interview, he suggested that he'd rather spend his money (he being the major bankroller still) shooting for glory than settling for a profitable little server business pointlessly nibbling at Red Hat's leftovers.
You can say a lot about Shuttleworth, but he's not prone to lying about this sort of thing.
But yeah, if you're making a distro that doesn't appeal to either the sort of people who can volunteer useful help, or the sort who are willing to donate money
I must be an exception then, since I've contributed both code and money and if you spend a little time in the vast Ubuntu Forums you'll find there are plenty of people contributing expertise, if not actual code, much of which is useful for any distro, not just *buntu.
I personally don't use the Launcher thing for anything other than launching programs so I'm not sending any meaningful search data to Amazon (Do I care if they know I opened gparted?) However I do think the whole 'scope' idea is interesting and for this reason I've left it activated just to see how it might develop into something that I would find useful one day.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Much more interesting are the ones in politics (eg. because of the completely absent reaction to the NSA scandal).
Here are all the winners with a short description:
Communications and Marketing: Marc Shuttleworth, Ubuntu
Business and Finance: XBox One /Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
Administration: Whistleblower-Platform which is hosted in another country by the same institution that hosts similar services for other countries and agencies / Beatrix Karl, ÖVP
Politics: The NSA and the silence of the lambs / Werner Faymann and the government
Worldwide data hunger: ITU Technical Specification for Deep Packet Inspection / Hamadoun Touré, ITU
Lifetime nuisance: NSA - Yes we Scan
Well, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. So one could argue that they can use the work done by Canonical but won't have to pay for it.
And Ubuntu is based on Debian. So one could argue that they can use the work done by Debian but won't have to pay for it?
Unity is getting slow. I get crash errors ever 10 mins, no idea what is crashing but it doesn't affect my usage apart from having to keep closing those error boxes. I would LOVE to get involved and try the latest Ubuntu but I really don't want to install spyware on my machine.
Remember all those Ubuntu apologists before? "Why worry about it, it's as simple as apt-get remove somewierdname". Next version is suddenly more integrated and you can no longer simply apt-get remove the package. Gullible fools.
However KDE looks awful. It is so unpolished. And there are loads of UI bugs that make it unpleasant to use. The final straw for me was double-clicking on a movie residing on my NAS, and KDE deciding to spend 5 mins copying the whole thing to /tmp before attempting to play it.
So far XFCE is shaping up to be the next popular desktop. I've moved several people to it and they love it. It feels a little basic for me but then what is the alternative?
The best things that could happen:
a) Canonical back-tracks and decides not to screw over its user base
b) KDE has a massive sprint to fix UI, and forgets trying to aim for QT 8.0 which works on smart watches
c) developers shift from Unity to XFCE and it starts to take over
d) a new contender emerges
So far (d) looks the more likely, despite so much time and effort already sunk into and currently wasted in (a) and (b).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
They do. ;)
The ask for a donation when you download the ISO.
And guess what?
They complained about that too. Very loudly indeed.
In summary, there will always be people on forums complaining about everything.
They will always be first and loudest.
The people who just install it, judge it good enough and put a dollar in the hat don't go on-line to troll about it.
Long live Mark, Canonical, Unity and Mir.
Wait, if you don't care people adopt it on the desktop, why do you even care that Ubuntu exists? In what way does its existence harm your Linux experience?
It harms my Linux experience because nowadays some software developers support Ubuntu and then claim they support Linux.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
You are not the "product" just because you use something appears to have no dollar value assigned to it, and just because I don't pay to use Google or any of their services does not mean they aren't services.
I pay them with my information and they allow me to use their services. They in turn sell this information to others who associate a dollar value with it. This is not unlike the bartering system where I give you a goat in exchange for you building me a table and you then give the goat to someone else in exchange for gold.
Yes Google makes money off our information, but good luck getting that information without enticing us with the ability to use their products and services which in turn cost them quite a lot to supply. Anyone who claims that a person is the product is woefully ignorant of the flow of value through Google's intricate web.
Bottom line is that Google offer many products and services and we pay for them with information.
Oh so Windows leaking info all over the place with no way to turn it off wasn't quite enough for the award i guess. I nominate Austria for the Ignorance award.
The problems with Ubuntu are a big deal because getting people to switch to free software was supposed to be the solution to these privacy problems. We had a nice, simple message: "GNU/Linux doesn't spy on you". Ubuntu muddies the waters, which is annoying because solutions are pretty thin on the ground.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Why doesn't these companies get it instead, as they work with NSA. Canonical at least lets you turn off any collection of data - Microsoft, Facebook and Apple and Google hands it over without you ever knowing it.
RedHat & SUSE sell primarily into the server markets, and don't have a big stake in what happens in the desktop. As for everyone else, define 'found monetary income'. The donations simply don't cut it, and they need to find ways to make money. They can't sell their distros, since other distros are free (as in water), and they haven't figured out how to sell it w/ hardware. Advertizing is one option that they have, and Ubuntu tried that, as well as new projects like the Ubuntu phone & Myth TV. Let's see what works.
Believe it or not, I'm still using Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS, and I keep receiving kernel (currently 2.6.32-52-generic) updates along with libc libraries and other basic stuff. Still enjoying Gnome 2--everything stays where I want it and doesn't get in the way. I've been pleasantly surprised for well over a year that it still works fine. Don't need any new stuff, anyway.
(this comment could have been in the EOL XP article under 'refusal to upgrade'!)
This. Well said, sir
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
On a clean install of 13.10 I got a couple of crash reports for trivial stuff for the first couple of days, but now it's rock solid. Keep /home on a separate drive and do a clean install of / on every release and Ubuntu is solid enough for production desktop.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
If a for-profit entity offers you a service for free, you're not the customer -- you're the product. Mozilla offers freebies and you are not the product. Ubuntu shifts the profit elsewhere from the sticker price, like Google does. That said, I'll take Canonical over Google any day. And Mozilla's products over both. I use both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu.
Because it's the most polished distro, I realize I'm not cool for that.. and I can live with that.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.
e) Former Ubuntu users who feel betrayed have an epiphany: There's no such thing as a free lunch.
I downloaded the ISO earlier today to try it and see how it's changed, and noticed the donation thing. I personally don't like how they put the skip under a whole list of things.
Secondly, the OS is unusable to me because it simply doesn't feel like it was designed for human beings...
1. They took the Windows Taskbar and put it on the left hand side of the screen. You cannot move it. The icons are ugly as dog fecis, as well, and the rubber banding that happens when you scroll all the way to the top of it is not attractive.
The dock should be at the bottom of the screen by default. It makes no sense being pasted to the left.
There is an option to hide it, though... And it will pop out when you put the mouse there...
2. They took Apple's way of displaying menu bars, which completely threw me for a loop. If you're using an app full screen this is all obvious, but Firefox started off as a normal window, and I was pressing ALT- and all sorts of other buttons trying to get to the menubar. It doesn't even show up until you mouse ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP of the screen (not just in the app window, the whole screen). Then, the menu bar isn't aligned with the application window.
This is fine for people who are moving from OSX, but for Windows users migrating over, they will be completely stomped just trying to find the menu bar in the applications they open!
They moved the window buttons to the left hand corner of the screen, Lol...
---
They should have just done a Windows-style task bar and left the application menus in the application. For some applications (i.e. GIMP) this makes sense. For the large majority of applications (Productivity Software, Groupware/PIM applications, Web Browsers, File Managers, etc.) it serves no purpose but to confuse the user.
And for some reason, looking at the screen it just feels like I have less screen real-estate than on Windows. I think it has a lot to do with the toolbars and stuff which aren't in Windows Apps like Internet Explorer vs. Firefox - and of course that Menu Bar (at the top) and Taskbar uses space as well... It just seems off.
I think the UI font looks a lot better than in past Linux distros that I've used. Font in apps still seems worse than on Windows or a Mac, though.
Why are they using Abandonware like Thunderbird in their distro, instead of Evolution which is much more powerful?
If they want to be the OSX for people who don't have a Mac, they really need to focus on the aesthetics a bit more, and stop wasting screen space and doing things differently for the sake of being different.
I also hate that Search pulls in information from so many damn sources. It was really overwhelming. I got to an app list once, but couldn't find it again after I closed that window.
UGH. Frustrated with it, Lol.