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Comment by liareye | Hacker News Reader

For the convenient Amazon button in the dock?

Wow, what a dilemma! Which one should I go for: full-bore telemetry including memory contents and keyboard events with RCE capabilities or an Amazon button that just sits there until I click it? Truly, this is like Sophie's Choice /s

False dichotomy. Other distros/envs not supporting scummy practices exist too.

I was using (explicitly marked) sarcasm to highlight the false equivalence in parent's post. Obviously the choices of OS is not limited to Windows vs. Unity on Ubuntu

Right, but your response to scummy practices was "which is why I use [other thing with scummy practices]."

I'm sure you can justify why a button isn't as bad as spyware to yourself, but to anyone who puts up with neither, the parent comment makes sense without needing to 'equate' the two. They're both not things you'd put up with; and the 'sophie's choice' (yes, I saw the tag) joke would instead just be a response for a different platform.

> Right, but your response to scummy practices was "which is why I use [other thing with scummy practices]."

This is comparing apples to oranges though: on one side we have a Unity lens that can be turned off and is restricted to searches, and on the other you have what I can only describe as a turnkey APT (RAT,RCE, process spy, device spy, keylogger, memory scraper) that cannot be switched off - how hard do you think it would be for a nation-state to 'enrich' and intercept/redirect this telemetry?

You lose a great deal of detail by intentionally avoiding the nuance of the situation: murder by starvation or Nitrogen asphyxiation is still death, but there is value in discussing the cruelty of persons who would choose one method over the other to kill, especially if one of them lets you opt-out.

Additionally, Ubuntu and Unity (host of the Amazon button) are not equivalent in any case. I use Ubuntu with KDE, others with XFCE or Gnome. So using Ubuntu in no way equates with putting up with scummy practices.

edit: expanded and split 2nd paragraph

I see your point, but take another look at that telemetry list. It's long ways from spying on what happens inside one search box.

The Amazon integration in the search box isn't even a thing anymore as of 16.04 (i.e. it's now opt-in, rather than opt-out).

The only thing left from the Amazon deal is that they have a referral link on the panel by default. Takes exactly two clicks to get rid of and does not do any form of telemetry.

Xubuntu (with xfce instead of Unity) doesn't have that kind of thing. After you've moved panel #0 to the bottom, it's much closer to Window's UI as well.

They've removed that since 16.04.

It is still there in 16.04 and above (unity-webapps-common package): http://askubuntu.com/questions/760204/how-to-remove-the-unit...

I believe in that case it was someone upgrading to 16.04 rather than a fresh install. The user configuration would remain unchanged in that case.

Here are some other sources: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/01/ubuntu-online-search-feat...

https://www.howtogeek.com/188589/5-things-you-need-to-know-a...

He's talking about the Amazon button, not the search box integration. They do still have a referral link glued to the panel by default. But yeah, that's such a non-issue, that I don't understand either why you'd even bring it up, unless you're really trying hard to find something to cling on.

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