Comment by heavyset_go
4 years ago
> Linux maintainers do unpredictable things to all sorts of things.
With Linux you don't have to worry about every program you launch being reported to the mothership, or that failure of the mothership to respond would cause your computer to not function.
If you're not reading all the source of everything you're running, any or all of it it absolutely could be reporting usage/stats/your data to a "mothership".
Just because there's no single central org involved doesn't mean there aren't risks.
You don't need to read it, you just need to be able to read it.
Just because there are risks doesn't mean the risks are meaningfully comparable.
Ken Thompson won a Turing Award for showing how that isn’t the case: http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thom...
2 replies →
We already know that, by design, macOS will report back to the mothership. If things are working 100% correctly, Apple will collect what programs you run and when you do so.
Linux won't report to the mothership by design. If things work 100% correctly, you don't have to worry about some company knowing what programs you run and when.
> If you're not reading all the source of everything you're running, any or all of it it absolutely could be reporting usage/stats/your data to a "mothership".
there's a big difference in threat vector between one mothership and 200.
Just because there's no single central org involved doesn't make it safe.