Thanks Canonical for this great Telemetry master piece hidden in a Daily "News" (Message of the Day) deep inside the core of Ubuntu.
I found it active on all the Ubuntu laptop of my friends and coworkers, all Ubuntu servers from local ISP and my work. As well as on all Ubuntu flavours and Ubuntu derived Linux distros. It is also present in cloud-init images of major cloud providers, and all Docker images from Docker Registry based on Ubuntu. What a (s)hell for transparency! -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to base-files in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1867424 Title: motd-news transmitting private hardware data without consent or knowledge in background Status in base-files package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: In package base-files there is a script /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd- news that harvests private hardware data from the machine and transmits it in the background every day. There is no notice, no consent, no nothing. This should be by default disabled until there is informed consent. This solution is simple: 1. Change ENABLED=1 to ENABLED=0 in the file /etc/default/motd-news and 2. Place a comment in the file disclosing the fact that the 50-motd-news script will harvest private hardware data and upload it to motd.ubuntu.com daily if the end-user enables it. Creating databases that maps ip address to specify hardware is a threat to both privacy and security. If an adversary knows the specific hardware and the ip address for that hardware their ability to successfully attack it is greatly increased. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/1867424/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
