[xubuntu-users] How wide spread is Linux spyware?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2015 13:44:44 -0700, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>Giving the audience enough technical information to address the
>problem is much better than vague, non-specific FUD.  (I always
>thought that was the M$ approach....)

Actually two Xubuntu users report about that pop up windows, so it
isn't FUD. You might want to read the Ubuntu Studio devel archive from
today, to get more information about this topic and to read about
several additional examples.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-studio-devel/2015-July/date.html

Perhaps you could explain why the root password is needed for those pop
up windows the subscribers from this list reported.

Btw. do you really believe that RMS spreads FUD? Any comment to the RMS
link?

The approach of Canonical is the same as that of restricted OS, you
wont find such things for my Arch Linux install, excepted of some
apps that misbehave, such as atom-editor, sylpheed, ardour, firefox ...
there is absolutely no reason that apps by default connect to the
Internet, even if they only should check for updates without collecting
data. The solution is to not use such apps, that's quite easy to do, if
you set up your own install, IOW when using Arch, LFS and a few other
distros, but it's harder to do, when using distros that provide a ready
to use environment OOTB, as e.g. the Ubuntu flavours do.