On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 11:32 -0600, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
On Wednesday 31 January 2007 11:15, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
It must be opt-in.
- May-be you should consider to talk to RH legal.
In many parts of this world opt-out is ILLEGAL.
It should be is a matter of fairness to make it opt-in.
In many parts of this world SPY-WARE like yours is a very hot
political topic. You are at risk at exposing Fedora to be subjects to such flames. Even Microsoft has learned their lessons and made "registration opt-in", now you are committing the same FAULT.
Ralf,
it is not registration, it is not spy ware.
It unattendedly collects various data which is not publically available from a local machine => SPY-WARE
Connecting this information with IP-numbers opens many opportunities for abuse => Opens many chances to privacy breaches.
I don't have any reasons to trust this URL smolt sends it data too.
it is a voluntary hardware profile. there is no way to know that a profile is yours unless you give me your unique hardware id that is generated on your system at package install time.
You have this (BTW: absolutely not unique and forgable) hardware id in connection with IP-numbers. This allows backtracking.
You might have heard about the fuzz HW CPU-ID had caused in the past?
This will help fedora in many ways.
I guess, I don't have to mention: My opinion differs very much.
it is opt-in you can choose to install or not install smolt.
Mike asked about making installation the default. That's why I am so embarrassed.
Having a script that is not being run automatically (not used by first boot), but being run at user-request as part of eg. a bug-report (similar to bug-buddy) is a completely different topic.
Feel free to look at the code. there is no package list sent, no ip, no anything that can be associated to you without you giving me your id.
I'll pretty soon add an "Obsoletes: smolt" into the base package of my local repos.
And again to re-iterate it is entirely voluntary "you choose" to submit or not your profile
OK, I will have a look at the sources and look if something has changed since it was under review. At that time I did not notice any opt-in, but noticed a scripts being run at installation time.
In this particular case, I'll continue to be VERY stubborn.
There is not way to convince me about such spy-ware. If you want to collect statics with an opt-in, you can achieve the same by launching a counter website.
Ralf