Bug #146895

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Jun 20, 2008, at 8:27 PM, Dougie Richardson wrote:
> ...
> This bug [1] has kind of reached a stale mate and to be honest I think
> that the status should be changed to "Won't Fix". It's a very uncommon
> usage scenario, extremely unlikely and there is no current tool to be
> documented that solves the issue.
> ...
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc/+bug/146895
> ...

Since Ubuntu is freely redistributable, widely redistributed, and 
increasingly popular, eventually someone will have sufficient incentive 
to distribute something that claims to be Ubuntu but isn't.

This is already happening with Firefox. It started mildly enough, with 
sites that disguise Google's "download Firefox" button ad as their 
download link (thereby earning commission on downloads), and sites that 
require you to enter your e-mail address (supposedly so that they can 
e-mail you the download link). But now there are sites that invite you 
to pay for the Firefox "premium edition", sites that offer Firefox with 
their toolbar or extension of choice pre-installed, and even reportedly 
a site that offers spyware disguised as Firefox 3.

Mozilla's main defence against this is robustly defending the Firefox 
trademark (which indirectly led to the Iceweasel saga), and encouraging 
people to download Firefox only from getfirefox.com. But Ubuntu is a 
much bigger download than Firefox (so using someone else's CD or 
downloading from a geographically close mirror is noticably easier), 
even downloading from www.ubuntu.com *requires* you to choose a mirror 
site with a strange name, and Linux users are more familiar with the 
idea of mirrors in general. These factors in combination make us more 
socially vulnerable to a malicious download site, or to someone 
distributing CDs falsely claiming to contain Ubuntu.

It's not a "bug" as usually defined, but it is a problem that needs 
solving. Just not by the documentation team.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/


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