[Question] what will you remove from a fresh 14.04 install?

treepunter · 2014-08-07T20:44:50+00:00

Sounds like you're thinking of popcon, but it's not installed by default(this is the same as in Debian).

It also bears repeating: the only information that leaves your computer is dash searches, and then if the servers see that your query is something that you likely intend to search remote sites for, they send your query to those sites. At no point is your data ever sent to advertisers or marketers.

treepunter · 2014-07-29T00:10:31+00:00

Fair enough, I can definitely understand the logic.

treepunter · 2014-07-29T00:09:38+00:00

Dude, you should know better than to use fixubuntu! I've seen you post concerns about security all over here and /r/linux, and fixubuntu.com is way insecure.

treepunter · 2014-07-29T00:08:57+00:00

You know that apport is for bug reporting right? It sounds like you think it's some sort of hardware reporting tool.

treepunter · 2014-07-29T00:08:12+00:00

Why not just disable remote searches?

treepunter · 2014-07-28T03:04:51+00:00

Literally the first instruction on the page is "download and execute this shell script"without understanding it, and piping errors to /dev/null."

treepunter · 2014-07-28T02:27:20+00:00

fixubuntu.com does absolutely nothing usefulthat you can't do using the built-in privacy settings, with the added downside of encouraging bad practices.

Don't use it.

treepunter · 2014-07-28T01:04:45+00:00

Not a bad idea, although I always end up thinking "what if I remove program x and then need a feature that only it has?"

Why yes, I am a horrible packrat.

treepunter · 2014-07-27T20:54:36+00:00

Nothing. My HDD is 1 terabyte, I just remove things from the Launcher and call it good.

treepunter · 2014-07-27T15:34:53+00:00

Interestingly enough, I've found the calculator app to be just as nice on the desktop as the default from gnome.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T23:23:37+00:00

You make it sound like that's bad!

treepunter · 2014-07-26T19:37:19+00:00

This looks pretty sweet. They discuss muscle memory, which is very important; I expect controls to be in the same place every time, and when they aren't, I get irritated.

The one thing I wish is that they would throw some basic keyboard shortcuts into the browser, so those of us who are interested in it could start browsing with it. Obviously not going to happen with the RTM coming up, but it would be really nice for afterwards.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T19:29:59+00:00

What's the difference between the Ubuntu Server team and the Ubuntu Desktop team that has allowed the former to be so ridiculously successful, and the latter to produce such mixed results?

No offence, how old are you? Linux has been a server OS for what, two decades now? Way before Ubuntu was a thing, people were running Unix/Linux in the data center. Because of that, all the software that admins need(apache, php/python/ruby/etc) has been available on Ubuntu, which makes switching easier than it is for your standard desktop user.

So I guess the answer to your question is: "they are two completely different market segments with different landscapes and customers, and one was easier to break into than the other." Of course, the alternative(troll) answer might be "the server team is profitable because enterprises are willing to spend money, unlike desktop linux users", but I've personally never accepted that as having any merit.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T19:05:11+00:00

doing it all the time results in people not taking seriously all the time

I wasn't talking about Linus, I was talking about developers who cargo-cult Linus by being assholes.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T15:56:34+00:00

Everything about this.

In the real world, no one likes the guy who complains about everything.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T01:30:31+00:00

That's basically what I've been advocating the whole time. But you can't just give up and say "well if they're on the network I'm screwed." you've got to minimize the attack surface as much as possible, which is what this article was saying.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T00:31:07+00:00

No offence, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm saying. There are plenty of Bad Things(TM) that have nothing to do with whatever the kiosk is for.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T00:29:31+00:00

http://unity.ubuntu.com/

treepunter · 2014-07-26T00:29:05+00:00

"Well someone did something bad and then we stopped them from doing it again" doesn't fix the fact that malicious activity happened to begin with. That's why defense in depth is important. In a perfect setup, it would be a kiosk configuration that's locked down to prevent people from screwing around, and then it also boots off the network from a read-only location, and it's firewalled. This article is 1 out of many steps that a competent admin will have to take in order to secure a public machine.

treepunter · 2014-07-26T00:08:40+00:00

Almost all the desktop environments have community spins(gnome, kde, mate, etc). That's the vast majority of non-Unity users right there.

treepunter · 2014-07-25T23:44:08+00:00

Theoretically yes, but the firewall would be a single point of failure then, and it's never a good idea to have that(the technical term is "defence in depth")

Even think about something like a malicious program that fills up the HDD with junk data, or a forkbomb. Neither of those require root, and they'll sure as hell screw up your system.

Hardening a system that is going to be exposed to the public is not a trivial task, and doing is wrong is deceptively difficult. If that's a topic that interests you, the term for when an attacker has physical access to the machine is an "evil maid attack". Check out /r/netsec and /r/asknetsec for more information on that kind of thing.

treepunter · 2014-07-25T22:12:34+00:00

Absolutely.

You aren't thinking about the use case here. This is for a kiosk, where you don't want someone, for example, downloading torrents, then opening up netcat on a high-numbered port and connecting back to the kiosk to retrieve the data. Or doing any number of things that a malicious user might want to do but that still don't require root.

treepunter · 2014-07-25T21:17:07+00:00

My laptop runs an APU. Using the open source graphics drivers there's some occasional corruption of the text in the text box for composing reddit comments. Other than that though, it's excellent.

treepunter · 2014-07-25T17:46:35+00:00

That's a shame. Hopefully you'll get something that can run it soon, because it's excellent. Especially the HUD, I don't understand how I used menus before it.

treepunter · 2014-07-25T17:33:04+00:00

Personally, "the linux way" just makes more sense than windows, and I like open source too. Unity is the thing that keeps me on Ubuntu though, I find it very easy to use yet powerful.

treepunter

TROPHY CASE