Hi Evan, Thanks for bringing this up. I've been trying to come up with a sensible response to the original thread, but I figure since I wear a few hats, I'd wait to reply with my TB hat on, and try to merge all my thoughts now.
I have no general objection to collecting this kind of information, so long as it provides actual value. For example[1], connman connects back to http://www.connman.net/online/status.html and reports its version every time it establishes a network connection. This provides direct value to the user because their software is able to better detect if it has actually found a "real" Internet connection or not, and do something about it. What value does the installer connect-back actually provide the user? Why are raw counts of any value? It would seem that reporting a full set of hardware details in the connect-back would actually give you better before/after logs ("people with FooBar wifi are never seen again"), but it still doesn't provide the user with immediate direct useful improvement to their Ubuntu experience, so I'm not sure it's worth doing. Thanks, -Kees [1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=network/connman/connman.git;a=blob;f=plugins/portal.c Thanks to Marc Deslauriers for pointing this out to me. -- Kees Cook Ubuntu Security Team -- technical-board mailing list technical-board@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
