I find that difficult to disagree with.
Like a headless chicken; reacting in a panic-stricken and unthinking manner; the phrase alludes to the phenomenon whereby a chicken can move about for a short time after decapitation, due to reflex activity of the nervous system. I suppose one could also infer brainless.
I usually enjoy comedy; it’s a shame I missed it.
I really don’t think the language is much of an issue - the app is simple enough many of us could edit and compile it regardless of the language.
And it is not even necessary to do that to spoof the results - since the app appears to run the first inxi it finds on the PATH someone could just have their own inxi serve up pre-formatted nonsense to pollute the results.
There really is no getting round the need to do checks on the data supplied.
The idea of the GUI was to show not just the data collected from the user being sent, but the actual graphs and statistics as well that you had on that online cockpit.
To be able to see the stats, the user would have to share his data though.
You don’t need to modify any app, the endpoint just takes any JSON, however it was created.
The idea of the MDD is cool, not gonna lie I want telemetry to be sent to developers so they can do their work more efficiently. But I found it a little deanonymising to send timezone as a IANA timezone record, as this reveals user’s city or town where they live right now, or have always lived. In my opinion the thing that should be sent is only UTC offset. I may be a little paranoic, but I just wanted to say what I wanted to say. And by the way, I opened GitHub issue with the simple way to find the offset (you just replace tzlocal.get_localzone() with my solution from the issue), and as a side-effect the dependency from tzlocal and pytz, as the tzlocal will no longer be used, and IANA zoneinfo database should be already be present on the system, thus, no dependency on pytz that just does the same thing - provides the IANA zoneinfo.
That is all what I actually wanted to say.
P.S: Sorry for my english.
disclaimer: I’m actually not affected. I joined this forum after having bought a Manjaro phone community edition only, some years back… and never switched from running arch on x86.
However, I can tell you with 100% certainty, that Manjaro is legally obliged to make a telemetry feature opt-in and any automatic changes to it. This is because the company behind Manjaro is located in Europe and most Manjaro users are, without much doubt, private individuals. Just ask a professional before doing such things, in your own interest.
I also want to share a loosely related topic:
About a dozen years ago I filed a bug with a linux network managing software, connman. The tool is in the linux kernel repo only and without a bugtracker, since Intel has largely given up hosting open-source projects under their umbrella. The bug was to get a software feature to turn off a connectivity check connman used. Basically a ping like networkmanager, but there was neither a feature to turn it off nor to configure the ping endpoint.
I was quite surprised about this lack of configurability at the beginning. Then, I realized the project got started by automotive engineers and its first use-case was in cars (it got used by a major car manufacturer using linux in the vehicles). Now, with cars connectivity must be perfect at roaming, and all drivers have to acknowledge (read opt-in) TOS (which includes data-collection preambles) when they start the engine. So, the software was very good at handling mobile and wifi roaming, but was not primarily intended for Linux-PC use. Hence, there was no malintent, or the project sponsor Intel harvesting roaming IP addresses for statistical purposes, whatsoever. No big issue, just an oversight, the bug got fixed and connman it’s first ever switch to turn off ‘telemetry/connectivity pings’ (on PC, not in the cars;).
I won’t participate further in this thread, but hope you see the connection (no pun intended) and why I share the example.
Take the right conclusions for your mdd project. Peace.
There’s a reason why none of us are using Fedora or Windows.
Well, that was a wasted opportunity to make a serious comment.
It’s a reply to a specific user. The dev seems to be under the impression that because some other distro’s have opt out telemetry (or pretty close to) then it’s okay for Manjaro.
Yet, a good 60% of people I know who had swapped to Manjaro did so because there was no or extremely limited data collection. Because of announcing MDD and that the impression given was that it was going to be rolled out as opt out… (every time the devs have asked this question in the past, it was always confirmed to be opt-in, why would you keep asking the same question if you were going to do the same thing?), many of those people have already gone to other distributions.
Some of these people previously used windows, fedora, ubuntu.
Opt-in is fine, everyone is on board with that, no one has an issue. If manjaro had said “we’re going to roll out Opt-in Telemetry” there wouldn’t be at least two threads (one locked) on the subject.
Opt-out telemetry appears not to be legal in Europe either, meaning that the devs have not done due diligence.
A controller must also beware that consent cannot be obtained through the same motion as agreeing to a contract or accepting general terms and conditions of a service. Blanket acceptance of general terms and conditions cannot be seen as a clear affirmative action to consent to the use of personal data. The GDPR does not allow controllers to offer pre-ticked boxes or opt-out constructions that require an intervention from the data subject to prevent agreement (for example ‘opt-out boxes’).4
That’s debatable since what you quote only applies to personal data. From reading this thread, I know that some will argue until they turn blue in the face that the information can somehow be tied to an individual, but that’s clearly not the intention of Manjaro.
Not to chime in on the entire “this is personal information” debate, but whether or not Manjaro does want to personalize the data or tie it to a use does not matter for the lawmakers as long as the data could be used that way.
Just to be perfectly clear here !! I don’t argue or try to say that you can use the data Manjaro wants to collect in such a manner or that they want to do this. I don’t want to be part of that particular discussion.
I am just saying that the Manjaro team should definitely consult some instance that is proficient enough with the EU laws to check whether or not they can get into hot waters with their data collection strategy if they haven’t consulted a legal team (or legal assistance) yet, just to be on the safe side.
By the way, will the Manjaro team not resume this test?
It was a lot of fun and I was looking at the data.
I too enjoyed looking at the data. I’ve long told people that if you need to find me, don’t look under the fat part of the bell curve. I hate crowds.
I was delighted to find my testing laptop and my desktop maintained my edge case status–although at opposite ends. I have to do something about my newer laptop as it sits right at the 8C/16T cluster. Although the 32GB and 8TB keep it to the edges of the cluster, so maybe that counts.
Although it was nice to find I’ve shed part of me weird kid status by using Plasma.
Did they really do that?, I didn’t know this side of the Linux community, it’s really bad.
Apart from the possible legal issues, in my opinion, developpers should respect the users by making this spyware opt-in.
Pushing a thing like this as opt-out is rather unrespectful.
Lots of people choose Linux over Windows or Mac because of the built-in spyware in those OSs, and now the same is coming to Linux.
Labelling it spyware is also rather… disrespectful;
Clearly, it isn’t.
That is all. Cheers.
There is unfortunately a certain degree of elitism and immature clan mentality among the users of certain distributions, and especially so among former Manjaro users who are now using something called “btw”. 
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say. 
Ergo, mdd is not spyware, period.
I would never Opt-In to spyware, that would clearly be stupid, ignorant in or some other way misinformed, but believing MDD is spyware borders on the above as well, especially when a quick perusal of the Source Code, and the results it produces, will inform one what the truth is.
Fortunately MDD is simple Telemetry that helps make my favourite Distro better, and could also help get Linux in general get more attention where it is needed, so I’m safe Opting in to that.
What is sad is that far too many people will believe the conspiracy theory, about MDD, and not Opt In.
There’s only one small change I needed to do to the Python script, and that is to report a more accurate Installation Date for my system.
This is case-specific though. My system is now on its third storage medium since initial install, but the first hard disk had a bad sector affecting one of the files in / partition (specificially, it was getting stuck whilst upgrading one of the Haskell modules) so that had to be copied manually to the target disk, in a newly created partition, with the repairs having been done.
Modification was simple; line 218 changing / to /home as that is, in my case, a direct partition clone from first to current.
Sorry, I know this thread wasn’t supposed to be about discussing the technicalities.
In general, I don’t feel like I like this whole topic, I think based on these statistics and network data, compared over time, it will create a huge hole in privacy. I especially don’t like transmitting the mac address, IP, and time zone. I understand something about tracking and searching for users on the Internet, as well as methods for this action. So anonymization is becoming an increasingly difficult task, and this, in my opinion, is completely bad. Result: 1. As I understand it, it is disabled. 2. This is not necessary. 3. I don’t like it. Conclusion: 1. Those who will transmit statistics 2. Those who will not transmit them. If this is disabled, it does not bother me and I will stay with Manjaro, if not, there is something that will suit me without transmitting telemetry. Translated by Google translator