Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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Linux has /etc/machine-id and you forgot to setup your init daemon to periodically truncate and regenerate a new machine-id so you can be tracked via user telemetry analytics. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.

Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you'd also have to reboot to ensure it's updated.

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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 hours ago

I'm not sure who regards RedHat well actually, they've always been doing shitty things like trying to charge for Fedora hence why people ended up forking it as CentOS. They're a poster child for the problems with Linux getting commercialized. Saying Linus uses something is just appeal to authority by the way.

The problem, once again, is that a lot of the development is now driven by commercial companies like RedHat and Ubuntu that are in it to make money. So, in a way these things are actually pushed on the community because you either adopt them or it becomes increasingly difficult to run software on your distro.

Fragmentation in init was a real problem, but it could've been solved much better by just creating a common standard for configurations while keeping the original modular design. Systemd approach is very heavy handed, and introduces a whole bunch of new problems which didn't exist. The fundamental Unix principle is having small programs that do a single thing well and that can be composed together. Systemd goes directly against this principle.