User Suggests There Might Be Spyware in Ubuntu ??

**henke54** · May 12th, 2015

A user by the name of Zack Smith published an article on his website entitled "Is There Spyware in Ubuntu?" and targeted at Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, and Jane Silber, the CEO of Canonical.

This is not the first time someone is accusing Ubuntu of spying on users, as three years ago Richard Stallman called Ubuntu a spyware OS because of the integration of Amazon Search engine that collected users' desktop search activity and sent the data over to Amazon.

According to Zack Smith, the Ubuntu Linux operating system should not be trusted because of Canonical's new CEO, Jane Silber, whose previous job was at the C4 Systems division of General Dynamics within the US Military Industrial Complex, which focuses on using computers for spying.

"There is no reason to assume that the compiled executables and libraries that comprise most of Ubuntu are built from the same source code that Canonical makes publicly available," says Zack Smith. "It may have had 'patches' added that provide spying capability. Any spyware in the object code only needs to behave stealthily."

Now, Zack Smith suggests that, if you want to use Ubuntu and stay safe at the same time, you should compile the entire operating system from sources, similar to how Gentoo Linux is installed, a process that will take you at least two or three days. OK, but how about updates? Maybe we shouldn't be using the Internet at all...

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/214079/index.html

**Bucky Ball** · May 12th, 2015

Just one thing: who the heck is Zack Smith??? Any user can publish anything they like about whatever they like on their website. More FUD in a never ending flow of it about this subject, so ...

Thread moved to Recurring Discussions

PS: There's nothing stopping anyone from turning off the Amazon and shopping features. There's also nothing stopping anyone from using another flavour that has none of these features in the first place. And there's also nothing whatsoever to substantiate any of the spurious claims put forward by the mysterious 'Zack Smith'. As for Canonical doctoring the Ubuntu kernel so ...

It may have had 'patches' added that provide spying capability.

There may also be a monster under the bed and the moon may also be made of green cheese. Don't know what Zack's on, but I don't want any ... if he's going to go to the trouble of tapping out this FUD, he could at least substantiate it, but then it wouldn't be FUD and we'd all be hiding under the bed with the monsters ...

**craig10x** · May 12th, 2015

And you should also know that Richard Stallman is a bit of a koo-koo bird too

Ubuntu patches of the kernel do not have spyware...only improvements that make ubuntu run better...

And the Amazon searches on the dash are sent invisibly to them and it just sends back some purchase suggestions...in return, Canonical gets some money which they use to help develop ubuntu (not for profitting)...
works similar to when you get target ads on yahoo home page, for example..However, you can turn that off completely by going to system settings, and under the privacy settings, go to the search tab and just hit the off button....takes about 30 seconds to do that...

I do turn mine off only because i don't like the "clutter" and instead i periodically send a contribution to ubuntu instead...but it is NOT SPYWARE...