Canonical wins award for Amazon integration
:)
Austrians seem to have been busy with privacy related things. This too is from Austria http://europe-v-facebook.org/
I don't really agree with ubuntu winning the "privacy award" for those reasons :
-They have an "option" enabled by default in their desktop environment that spies on their user. Most users do not even know there is this option.
-Most of their softwares are non-free, which makes it difficult to know what the software really do.
-They support other softwares known to be "spywares". (Chromium and Google Chrome, for example)
So, again, I don't think they deserve this award, even when trying to look "better".
The award is a parody. They won it because their Unity desktop is detrimental to privacy.
That being said, most of their software is indeed free. In fact, Trisquel gets its software from Ubuntu.
Is Chromium "known to be spyware?" I haven't heard anything about that. I know some of its files have unclear licensing information, which is why it's not included in Trisquel, but I've never heard of it being spyware.
On 30/10/13 09:09, em9002 wrote:
> Is Chromium "known to be spyware?" I haven't heard anything about
> that. I know some of its files have unclear licensing information,
> which is why it's not included in Trisquel, but I've never heard of
> it being spyware.
Possibly, for a number of reasons. Firstly, anything typed in the
address/search bar is sent to Google by default. My understanding is
that Google uses SPDY extensively for its services (possibly including
the address/search suggestions) which maintains a persistent connection
for as long as the connection might be needed, which essentially makes
it like having a session cookie in your browser.
Google also tracks 404 errors, and has some other "bad" defaults such as
enabling 3rd party cookies and geolocation prompts.
The proprietary Google Chrome has more tracking, including "RLZ"
tracking and tracking how often Chrome is used through Google Update.
Wikipedia is your friend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
Andrew.
It sounds like you didn't understand the reference to "Big Brother". Read Nineteen Eighty-Four some time. :)
I'm not trying to incite a war here, but Chrome is the more clearly defined non-free browser than Chromium. Chromium is under a BSD license, but the licenses for the libraries included with it are all over the place.
That is why many Trisquel users are skeptical about it. There was some attempt by a forum member years ago to research this, but he never finished. It was the guy that did the GTK themes. Forgot his name.. grvrulz?
They deserve it. ;)
Regarding Chromium it has a few settings that could be spyware related, e.g:
* Autocomplete while typing in address bar (queries google for every letter).
* Prefetching DNS to google
* Checks all visited sites (as does firefox) against Google's bad website list for malware/phishing
* Includes built-in non-free flash player
* UID
* RLZ identifier, an encoded string sent together with all queries to Google or once every 24 hours.
* Google search access on startup for users with Google as default search
* A unique ID ("clientID") for identifying the user in logs.
* A timestamp of when the browser was installed.
* Google-hosted error pages when a server is not present
Some information taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron#Differences_from_Chrome
(SWIron is also not fully free ;-) )