Package: virtualbox-guest-additions-iso Version: 5.0.16-1 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation? The Virtualbox guest additions appear to include functionality which "phones home" and checks for updates being available, then notifies the user about them if any are. * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? Installed Virtualbox guest additions from virtualbox-guest-additions-iso into a Debian Jessie VM on a Debian Jessie host * What was the outcome of this action? See attached screenshot - a desktop notification pops up which tells the user that an update is available. * What outcome did you expect instead? No notification. I have this quaint notion that software should not "phone home" without asking the user for permission and that there should be a configurable option to suppress such behaviour, which defaults to "off". This is concernnig because it implies that the software checks a central point somewhere for existence of updates, leaking metadata about the user in the process. It also increases the attack surface of the machine on which it runs. -- System Information: Debian Release: 8.4 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) virtualbox-guest-additions-iso depends on no packages. Versions of packages virtualbox-guest-additions-iso recommends: ii virtualbox 5.0.18-dfsg-3~bpo8+1 virtualbox-guest-additions-iso suggests no packages. -- no debconf information