On 18-07-28 04:02 PM, Stefan Krusche wrote:

Hi Michael,

Am Samstag 28 Juli 2018 schrieb Michael:

...

Hi All,

I’m running Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS, Trusty Tahr with TDE as my only desktop installed. I do have some Gnome (and probably KDE) odds and ends programs installed as well.

I’ll also agree I’m pretty much a Luddite and have no desire for anything on my box talking to anyone on the Internet without my knowledge and express permission.

tl:dr Q1: How do you find phone home services? Q2: How do you remove them? Q3: If Ubuntu isn’t it, what is?

apt-get upgrade reported this morning that it wants to update “evolution-data-server-online-accounts.”

Minor digging into wtf is this evolution thing (and why does it think it can phone home without me knowing it?) shows it’s a Gnome component that’s apparently very hard to remove. [a]

In that digging I find several other services that seem to phone home without my knowledge or permission?

How do you know? .service files are, AFAICT, config files for systemd, or dbus, in this case, maybe. These services may or may not be activated. To check their status or stop them refer to the (systemd/dbus/service) documentation.

To find out to which package one of these belongs you can do this in a shell:

$ dkpg -S /usr/share/dbus-1/services/com.nokia.SingleSignOn.Backup.service

Seems to belong to a package named "signond" whatever that is. I just gave it a quick shot at my favorite search engine.

https://gitlab.com/accounts-sso/signond says:

"SignOn daemon

The SignOn daemon is a D-Bus service which performs user authentication on behalf of its clients. There are currently authentication plugins for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0, SASL, Digest-MD5, and plain username/password combination."

So this doesn't look like a phone home service but rather like a service for the user which I'd expect to require to be activated by the user. OTOH, some distros or programs come with undesirable defaults which you are not aware of until you start looking for them, like firefox for example.

But, that'd be a lot of work for all of these "suspicious" files, generally, I'd rather choose software which I believe I can trust, or at least trust more than the ones of which I know that they *are* data collecting and user behavior tracking etc.

...

michael@local [~]# ls -1 /usr/share/dbus-1/services {full list at [b]}

com.google.code.AccountsSSO.SingleSignOn.service com.nokia.SingleSignOn.Backup.service com.nokia.singlesignonui.service

and ??? musicstore-scope.service unity-scope-facebook.service unity-scope-flickr.service unity-scope-openclipart.service unity-scope-video-remote.service unity-scope-yelp.service

Also in that digging, it seems that basically the only true way to get evolution (and its ilk) to stop bothering you is to:

sudo mv /usr/lib/evolution /usr/lib/evolution-fu

(see [a], Answer, “None of the above helped me”), which is a bit non-intuitive. Very cute though...

I’m left with questions...

Q1) With our resorting to something like Wireshark, how does one find all the packages that have phone home capabilities?

Q2) As ‘apt-get --purge remove’ doesn’t seem to work all the time, what’s the safest way to remove/disable them?

Why do you think it doesn't work? What output/error message do you get? I think that should always work, may remove a couple of dependencies, though, which should be indicated beforehand and asked for normally.

...

I went to Ubuntu (from CentOS) a couple years ago because it’s suppose to be ‘easier’ and it does do multimedia much better, but it doesn’t really seem to concern itself with customer ‘privacy.’

Q3) In the event this can’t be done in Ubuntu, is there a TDE supported *nix variation that may be ‘harder,’ but doesn’t just add a bunch of anti-privacy crap willy nilly?

TDE runs fine on Debian, Devuan, Arch Linux, SuseLinux and more, AFAIK. I'm running Devuan and I'm pretty sure there's no "anti-privacy crap willy nilly" which I haven't installed by myself ;)

Kind regards, Stefan

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Hi, I had this same update advice on Ubuntu 14.04 this morning and I googled "Evolution" to see what it is. I immediately determined I dont't want this thing so I did a "dpkg -l | grep evolution". The command returned a bunch of packages related to evolution I dont't remember I installed so I removed all of them completely with Synaptic. Then I rebooted and nothing I need was missing so I conclude that it was a good occasion to remove crap I never I asked for :-) Regards, Pascal