User Suggests There Might be Spyware in Ubuntu, Instructs Others to Compile the OS

...but is a little paranoia wise?

Ubuntu is a product produced by Canonical, not a community project built on principles. With a majority share of the Linux desktop pie, desire to produce their own components, and drive to produce mobile device platforms it's clear they would like to lockin users and monetize them. Many other popular distributions piggy back off Ubuntu's binaries and infrastructure, I'm sure Canonical wouldn't mind spinning a buck from all of them as well. There's no way to easily verify the binaries they distribute are produced from the provided source code, or that the source code is thoroughly scrutinized or scrutinized as a whole since lots of little innocuous things across a range of packages could add up to a nefarious whole.

Purely speculative of course. A little paranoia could be wise, just how trustworthy is Canonical? The trust given to them could be a very valuable resource to exploit. Those leeching off Canonical should consider some due diligence with compiling and distributing their own binaries or considering a different upstream (I've always wondered why Debian Mint doesn't get much love from Mint users).

All that's necessary for a headline (click bait) story these days is simply an assumption or allegation, with no direct evidence to support it.

However, Canonical has definitely fed these concerns with their selling of users' search queries.

I have posted this link to the ubuntu forum, and it was immediately 'moved' to the 'Recurring Discussions' ;) : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2277914

> I have posted this link to the ubuntu forum, and it was immediately 'moved' to the 'Recurring Discussions'

... where a baboon2 fanboi insisted the party line that "Ubuntu patches of the kernel do not have spyware...only improvements that make ubuntu run better"

Sure they're just "improvements" ::rolling eyes::

2c

It's far more likely that Redhat Enterprise Linux (and therefore also it's clones) has backdoors given that the NSA is a major customer of Redhat and that RHEL is extensively used in businesses all over the world (therefore in loads of interesting targets for the NSA).

> It's far more likely that Redhat Enterprise Linux (and therefore also it's clones) has backdoors given that the NSA is a major customer of Redhat and that RHEL is extensively used in businesses all over the world (therefore in loads of interesting targets for the NSA).

Good point. But then there's also Canonical's recent announcement of their partnership with MS for developing IOT devices...