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Ubuntu Disputes 'Ads In MOTD' Claims (twitter.com)
Thursday Lproven (Slashdot reader #6030) wrote:
It appears that Ubuntu is using a feature it has added -- intended to insert headlines of breaking tech news (security alerts and so on) into the Message of the Day displayed at login to the console -- to display advertising and promotional messages.
The message in question linked to a Hacker Noon article titled "How HBO's Silicon Valley built 'Not Hotdog' with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native." Later that day Dustin Kirkland, a Ubuntu Product Manager for the feature's design (and the Core Developer for its implementation) suggested the message had been mistaken for an ad, describing it on Hacker News as a "fun fact... an interesting tidbit of potpourri from the world of Ubuntu," and later saying it was intended like Google's doodles. "Last week's message actually announced an Ubuntu conference in Latin America. The week before, we linked to an article asking for feedback on Kubuntu. Before that, we announced the availability of Extended Security Maintenance updates for 12.04. And so on." He later confirmed Canonical received no money for the message, and also pointed out that the messages all come from an open source repository, and "You're welcome to propose your own messages for merging, if you have a well formatted, informative message for Ubuntu users."
Click through for a condensed version of the complete response by Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical.
Kirkland describes the design of the feature as follows:
The message in question linked to a Hacker Noon article titled "How HBO's Silicon Valley built 'Not Hotdog' with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native." Later that day Dustin Kirkland, a Ubuntu Product Manager for the feature's design (and the Core Developer for its implementation) suggested the message had been mistaken for an ad, describing it on Hacker News as a "fun fact... an interesting tidbit of potpourri from the world of Ubuntu," and later saying it was intended like Google's doodles. "Last week's message actually announced an Ubuntu conference in Latin America. The week before, we linked to an article asking for feedback on Kubuntu. Before that, we announced the availability of Extended Security Maintenance updates for 12.04. And so on." He later confirmed Canonical received no money for the message, and also pointed out that the messages all come from an open source repository, and "You're welcome to propose your own messages for merging, if you have a well formatted, informative message for Ubuntu users."
Click through for a condensed version of the complete response by Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical.
Kirkland describes the design of the feature as follows:
- Asynchronously, about 60 seconds after boot, a systemd timer fires which runs "/etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news --force"
- It sources 3 admin-editable config variables in /etc/default/motd-news. The defaults are: ENABLED=1, URLS="https://motd.ubuntu.com", WAIT="5"
- The admin can disable it entirely (ENABLED=0), change or add other MOTD news sources (your corporate IT team could run its own), and change the wait time in seconds
- If it's enabled, that systemd timer job will loop over each of the URLS (note, that it's important that these should be https with valid SSL certificates), trim them to 80 characters per line, and a maximum of 10 lines, and concatenate them to a cache file in /var/cache/motd-news
- Every ~12 hours thereafter (with a little bit of random timer fuzzing), this systemd timer job will re-run and update the /var/cache/motd-news
- Upon login, the contents of /var/cache/motd-news is just printed to screen.
Kirkland notes the message can be customized by local IT administrators, or used to deliver warnings about serious vulnerabilities like Shellshock or Heartbleed. And he also describes the dynamic motd as a Ubuntu feature since adopted by other distros (including Debian) as "a flexible framework that enables distro packages or administrators to add executable scripts in /etc/update-motd.d/* to generate informative, interesting messages displayed at login... for almost 40 years of Linux/UNIX, the 'Message of the Day' was anything but that... It was a message that was created at one point in time, when the distro released, and that's about it. And we managed to change that."
Tech industry robber barons have finally destroyed the last vestige of Unix freedom.
The message of the day is for local news to local users.
MOTD is off limits to vendors, you money grubbing assholes!
You damn kids, get off my box!
When Microsoft places ads in the form of recommended apps in Windows 10, it's denounced as evil. When Ubuntu places ads in the MOTD, it's somehow okay and completely acceptable. It's not unlike Ubuntu sending searches to the internet by default to retrieve recommendations for the user. Of course, this was also tolerated and considered acceptable. There's a double standard in which Microsoft is criticized for the very things open source also does. Now, I'll surely get censored by aggressive moderators who would prefer rather to mod me down to -1 rather than discuss the hypocrisy in what is otherwise an open source echo chamber.
>> Asynchronously, about 60 seconds after boot, a systemd timer fires which runs "/etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news --force"
So: proof positive that systemd is an evil tool of the devil.
You're a fucking shitstain who contributes absolutely nothing of value to humanity. Your only pursuit is to harass other people online for no other reason than you find them eccentric and disapprove of their body appearance. We all die, but when you do, nobody will want to attend your funeral because you're such a nasty loser of a human being. The only people who remember you will be those who want to possible and shit on your grave, because you were such a nasty person while you were alive. No doubt you try to pretend to others like you're a decent human being, but everyone sees through your phone facade and hates you behind your back. Decent human beings don't need to be told that waging a campaign of online harassment is wrong, especially against someone who did nothing against you. Go fuck yourself, you pink-skirted cum-guzzling unbathed shit-encrusted good-for-nothing motherfucking asshole.
I concur with the other replies you've received. You're an unfunny jackass who clearly has nothing better to do than harass and bully people online over their weight. You're a real scumbag. Grow the fuck up.
Whether the MOTD updates are advertisements or not is almost entirely irrelevant (although it's good for creating extra outrage).
The problem is that such a monumentally retarded mechanism exists *at all*. In fact, it's even a potential security issue. Sending arbitrary byte sequences to someone's terminal can do some very nasty things, unless they were smart enough to at least restrict it to printable ASCII. It's also an obvious vector for information leakage of various kinds.
...is that most users ignore them.
We used to have the motd file updated hourly with stats about availability, scheduled maintenance, disks that users should do some personal cleanup on, and other stuff that users were calling admins about and nobody paid much attention to the information. The more astute users quickly learned that that annoying information could be eliminated from their session by putting 'clear' in their profile.
Just like what happens with motd text, users will quickly learn where the advertisements will appear on their monitors and learn to not pay attention to those areas. The end result is that the ads are ignored. Well, unless you make them animated and/or play audio. Then users don't ignore them but you really tick them off and they're about as popular as a call from a telemarketer during dinner. Then you should expect to catch some hell.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Have you stopped fucking goats yet?
Do your parents know how you behave online? What do they think of it? What kind of parents raise a child to harass people online over their physical appearance?
I always knew that people behind Ubuntu were evil, but damn!
I'm never touching Ubuntu again.
I can't believe this shit was ever accepted. As someone who maintains hundreds of systems with actual users logging in, get the fuck off my lawn.
In my case the motd and issue files present legal disclaimers. Yet once again we have a case of companies with either extremely arrogant or ignorant people pushing out changes because they can. Yes, motd has been around for decades and everyone who knows what motd is, knows this. Just because we haven't posted a repo on github doesn't mean it's not used, and not updated.
Yeah he is just a kid who doesn't understand revenue streams he give me free publicity for my personal brand I make more + more money everyday on slashdot
Thanks!
-creimer
I wonder how many use the terminal in the first place for such an ad to be actually profitable anyway.
platform="$(uname -o)/$(uname -r)/$(uname -m)" /proc/cpuinfo | sed -e "s/.*: //" -e "s:\s\+:/:g")"
arch="$(uname -m)"
cpu="$(grep -m1 "^model name"
# Piece together the user agent
USER_AGENT="curl/$curl_ver $lsb $platform $cpu $uptime"
Nothing really damning. However, there is an advantage to gathering this info, even if it is (mostly) anonymous.
EG, how long people leave their machines up, how long between a kernel security announcement, and an reboot after that fact, what types of machines the userbase has, and on and on.
Couple that with advertising (and yes, telling people about yourself is advertising, it's called "brand awareness"), and you get definite value for Ubuntu.
I think it's silly, and even realistically a stupid feature -- but, it is something you can disable. And, all did was go to the package page for base-files, and download it, extract, and examine the script.
So, it's hard for me to get extremely upset.
There was a time when free software meant people didn't try to sell you shit. Those days are fucking gone.
Now every motherfucker is on the fucking grift. Even Linux motherfuckers.
Linux is also shit because EVERYTHING IS SHIT.
And, of course, there aren't, like, 50 other Linux distros that don't pull this kind of stunt for you to choose from.
You need to learn the difference between "is a subset of" and "equals".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
1. phone-home shit like this is evil and companies like ubuntu should just STOP. FUCKING. DOING. IT.
2. it's a bit fucking rich for hackernoon to complain about this when you can't even view their web site without enabling javascript from at least 6 different sites. They should just stop fucking doing that shit too.
Or BSD?
Or Haiku Project https://www.haiku-os.org/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Look at all the fat nerd pieces of shit you ruffled. Nice
If someone claims "it's not advertisment", then it is advertisment.
People don't like their OS to make network connections without a good reason. When I install a system, i expect it to make NO traffic at all, when I am not doing anything with it.
We can talk about stuff like NTP and update checks, IF I explicitely enabled it possibly automatic updates. But no fetching of random messages. What's next? Fetching new wallpapers? Sending telemetry data?
link motd to dev/null and issue solved.
Go fuck yourself, samefag.
go eat food and be lonely, you fat faggot
Went through this thread several times. I fail to see the crisis that has people pounding on their keyboards red faced and bulging bloodshot eyes.
I guess this never would have happened if we hadn't allowed systemd into the ecosystem.
Some people have work to do with a deadline that precedes when one would finish evaluating said 50 GNU/Linux distributions.
Was cash received? IT'S AN AD.
It doesn't matter if it's a news headline, fun fact, advertisement or fortune cookie/bible verse. It's spam and it shouldn't be there by default. It steals my attention.
My .hushlogin is 25 years old.
If I recall correctly, Ubuntu removed the searches going to Amazon by default. I'm guessing they will also remove this motd crap too. That said, the search crap resulted in me refusing to use their products and attempting to steer people away from Ubuntu. Just like I attempt to steer people away from MS.
Canonical forgot the golden rules about trust. People will give you an initial level of trust, but that same trust can be instantly lost. Once it's gone, it's extremely difficult to regain.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's Linux for people who are afraid to actually learn something. The only reason it's still around is because of marketing. This is how they pay for the marketing.
Reading is not your strong suit. In fact a 3rd grader could whip you!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Just set fortune cookie to overwrite /etc/motd every day.
Can lead to really funny stuff and some fun with admins.