Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth Wins Austria's Big Brother Award 116
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."
Re:Freedom isn't free (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Freedom isn't free (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
They are talking about typing something into a field labeled "Search your computer and online sources.
Call me crazy, but I normally have a real good idea whether I'm searching for something on my computer or on the interwebz. And the only use case I can think of where I'd ever want to search both for the same thing is if I want to run an app (say, Google Earth) that may or may not be installed, so I want to find and execute the installed instance, if any, and failing that, I'll search the web to find and download the installer. Even then, I want to search first one, then conditionally search the other.
So to me it's pretty obvious that the more useful behavior is two search boxen, one to search my computer, and the other to search online sources. Or perhaps one search box with two buttons, so I can click the local one, and if I don't get a result, click the web one.
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?
Well, there's two points of objection. One is an issue of how many and whose computers see your search queries -- which is ultimately addressable by changing which sources are enabled. In order to do an internet search, you've obviously gotta trust somebody with your search query -- so pick somebody and set up your sources correspondingly.
The other, and IMO bigger point, is that somebody -- whether it's canonical's search service, google, duckduckgo, or ixquick -- is receiving info every time you use that tool to search for a local document. No matter how much I trust ixquick, it's senseless to entrust them with more data in exchange for no benefit, so when I know I'm searching for a local file, I'd like the easy choice to not have my search query posted to any web search engine. Again, give me two search boxes, or one box with two (or more -- one for each source, one for all sources, etc.) buttons.