from fireshell@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 05 Nov 08:43
https://lemmy.ml/post/22160282
The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, built on the basis of Arch Linux and aimed at beginners, announced the beginning of testing a new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics about the system and send it to the external server of the project. The author of the MDD intended to enable telemetry by default (opt-out), but the decision has not yet been approved and, judging by the objections of some developers and users, it is likely that telemetry will be offered as an option requiring prior consent of the user (a request to enable telemetry is proposed to be added to the greeting interface after the first download).
The report includes data such as host name, kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information, network device MAC addresses, disk serial numbers, disk partition data, information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.
The sent data is stored on the project server in the ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. The IP addresses of users are not stored, and the hash from the /etc/machine-id file is used as the system identifier.
Аccording to the code github.com/manjaro/mdd/blob/master/mdd.py#L40 sends everything.
threaded - newest
That’s enough. I’m calling it evil from now on.
Thought it’s probably fine after reading the title, but this shit isn’t fine. What the fuck.
The MAC address is anonymized with sha256, and IP adresses aren’t stored.
So this seems to me to be perfectly anonymous.
Why collect such data though? And you can call some Big Tech telemetry completely anonymous too if you trust their explanations.
You can see the code of what is send.
I’m not aware that Google claims they collect data anonymously, on everything where you are logged in.
So that’s a false equivalence.
I meant other companies but ok.
MAC addresses are 48 bit, and half of that is just the manufacturer. So 24 bits really, and those bits aren’t random, I think manufacturers just assign these based on some scheme, like a serial number. Point is you could easily reverse the SHA by brute force.
You can’t calculate any useful statistic from a hash so literally the only use this would have is some sort of tracking.
Edit: I just looked up some data and I found someone using hashcat on an RTX 3090, which looks like it can do almost 10000 million SHA256 hashes per second of salted passwords (which are longer than 48 bit MACs, so MACs should be faster). 2²⁴ is 16.8 million, so it’ll take about 1.7 ms per vendor. I found a database with (all?) 53011 vendor ids:
Yup, 89 seconds. You can calculate the SHA256 of every single MAC ever potentially issued in 89 seconds on a bog-standard 3090.
It’s right at the top of the announcement, that it’s mainly for more accurate stats on unique users.
It’s not that I think this is a good idea, because I don’t, but some people are blowing it out of proportions. Especially since this isn’t at all decided. Which I seriously doubt it will.
You don’t need this to count unique users. You could just assign a random number on install or whatever. Or even more simply, just run the thing once per month, should be accurate enough. Do they expect the software to just randomly spam duplicate reports? Don’t write it that way.
Best case they don’t care about collecting minimal data and don’t understand that hashed MACs are easily reversible. So incompetent fools with no sensitivity to privacy.
Maybe this should be Manjaro’s tagline: Not purposely malicious, just grossly negligent and ignorant.
Funny, I thought the exact same thing.
we seriously need to get the reporting domain added to popular blocklists
What?
the program uploads the information to somewhere, right? just like the telemetry functions in windows. adding the domain they use to popular blocklists would help those who use pihole or something similar to that.
Oh I thought you had something against the OP or their source and wanted their domain blocked.
My brother’s been injecting himself with Linux? <img alt="jesse-wtf" src="https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f4eec943-179c-4416-a166-ed40dd07701d.png">
Another reason to hate manjaro.
Another reason to not use Manjaro. Just use Endeavour instead.
Edit: I’m not against telemetry pre se. I have the KDE feedback enabled for example but that was opt in and sends no unique data.
It’s all about trust. Manjaro has given me reasons to distrust them.
When?
Edit: I misread, though it said “trust” instead of “distrust”
That time they ddosed the AUR is an example. Incompetence is reason enough for me.
EDIT: manjarno.pages.dev
They’ve done it more than once now
wait, is that name “manjarno” like when brad pitt says bonjorno in inglorious basterds??
They’ve let TLS certs expire on multiple occasions. They’ve made the decision to enable the AUR in the default installation, which can cause conflicts with out-of-date dependencies because of the delayed release schedule compared to Arch. They’ve shipped software on their stable branch that included unmerged upstream code. One of their developers temporarily broke Asahi Linux.
I don’t hate the project, but I can’t trust the developers and management.
And they told their community to set their clocks back. As a workaround, it will work but all your created and modified data will have the wrong timestamps.
Wait, how??
He’s also a contributor to Asahi Linux. One of his MRs changed the build options that somehow caused it to (IIRC) use mainline Mesa instead of the branch that is specifically modified to work on ARM.
(edit) Aussie linux man: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDRiBbzzREw
It’s not only his fault, but mostly.
Endeavour could be useful if it’s your first time running an Arch-based distro and you’re looking for software/configuration suggestions. Otherwise, Arch Linux is fine by itself and it doesn’t have telemetry
I don’t think anybody would say otherwise. Both Manjaro and Endeavour mean to make Arch more appealing to users who aren’t comfortable with command line configuration.
Endeavour has arguably done better than Manjaro, but yeah. They’re just some configs on top of a system that does very well on its own.
endeavor keeps pushing updates with cringe AI desktop backgrounds and its making me want to install vanilla arch
Their whole aesthetics is super cringe
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Let me put the question back to you. How do think the uniquely identifiable information will help them improve Manjaro?
No.
As I basically said, if you bothered to read my comment.
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It amazes me it’s still as popular as it is and still own goaling at least once a year.
Opt-out? Seriously? What are the Manjaro devs smoking?
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Whatever they can get their hands on, including your unique hardware identifiers
Ad firm money.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but my first instinct when I see stuff like this is they have a secret contract with an advertiser and are selling this information.
Why do they need half that data for a derivative of a distro? Fuck off. I don’t care if someone collects the model number of my GPU or whatever but that sounds like personally identifiable tracking data, not basic “telemetry” data to set development priorities or whatever.
I tried Manjaro last year and I hated it.
Something about the distro would lock up my PC, it would freeze from time to time.
I disabled the standby/sleep function, but allowed my monitors to go into standby. But if I left my PC for an hour or two my screens would not wake up, different types and brands. I had so many issues with Manjaro and while speaking with a friend I told him I had moved over to Nobara but he was still on Manjaro. But then a few weeks later he mentioned he was running Nobara. Seems he also ditched it.
This may be illegal in EU if they don’t use opt in.
Even then it may be illegal for under 18 year olds to collect MAC addresses and disk serial numbers, as those can potentially be used for identification.The data is anonymized, and the IP is NOT stored. So I’m not sure this violates GDPR?
From the code we can see the machine ID is anonymized, sending only a SHA256 checksum.
def get_hashed_device_id(): # Read the machine ID with open("/etc/machine-id", "r") as f: machine_id = f.read().strip() # Hash the machine ID using SHA-256 to anonymize it hashed_id = hashlib.sha256(machine_id.encode()).digest() # Convert the first 16 bytes of the hash to a UUID (version 5 UUID format) return str(uuid.UUID(bytes=hashed_id[:16], version=5))This makes it somewhat a nothingburger IMO.
That’s not anonymous, that’s pseudonymous.
What is the point of this? The machine-id already looks to be some unique random number, so you’re calculating another unique random-looking number from that, might as well use the original number.
You can’t glean any useful information from a unique random-looking number that would help with developing Manjaro. You can’t calculate any statistics from that. The only use is tracking.
Edit: And as mentioned in my other comment, reversing the MAC SHA by brute force is trivial, so that one at least (and possibly the other hardware serial numbers they collect) shouldn’t even be considered pseudonymous.
Nah, it’s still considered Personal Data under GDPR, because it’s possible to connect to natural persons. So GDPR applies. And this is illegal, there is no legal basis for processing this data.
That’s debatable, and is only based on the claim that it’s just a 24bit decoding that can be brute forced. I don’t know for a fact that it’s true that it can be boiled down to 24bit.
I checked my own /etc/machine-id, and the folder doesn’t even exist, so what exactly is supposed to be in it IDK. And yes I use Manjaro.
I edited my comment on your other reply and by my estimation, calculating every SHA256 of all MACs ever potentially issued takes less than 89 seconds on an RTX 3090.
I also think MACs are (or should be considered) personally identifiable information, since there is potentially a paper trail back to the person who bought it. Plus MACs are not secret information, it’s broadcast on the LAN and for wireless modules over the air in the immediate vicinity (though some systems will randomize wireless MACs for privacy reasons). Privacy-unfriendly software has been known to collect MACs (even from other devices on the network and in the vicinity), so there are already databases connecting MAC addresses with other data.
Yes but because I don’t have the folder it reads myself, I can’t see what actually encoded. Are you sure /etc/machine-id is ONLY the MAC address?
Two nogos combined makes nonogogos. Why do they need host name, MAC address and disk serial numbers? Why can’t people set how much they want to send in, like KDE Plasma does? Will the data be shown to the user before its send in? Steam does that perfectly (show data and its opt-in) and that is even a proprietary application. Telemetry is okay if its done right, without user identification, opt-in and not hiding whats sent, preferably in multiple levels of what is being send.
I used Manjaro before and switched to EndeavorOS because I was not happy. Now I am. Manjaro can’t stop being stupid (not the users, I’m not attacking any user here, only the maintainers or developers of Manjaro).
The way I read it, the developer wanted opt-out but it's likely it will be opt-in. I'm find with opt-in and vehemently against opt-out for telemetry.
I would prefer the information was statistical only. Rather than hostname (making the assumption they only want hostname to be able to somehow separate the data to follow changes over time), a much better idea would be some kind of hash based on information unlikely to change, but enough information that it would be unlikely possible to brute-force the original data out of the hash. So all they know is, this data came from the same machine, but cannot ID the machine. Maybe some kind of unique but otherwise untrackable unique ID is created at install time and ONLY used for this purpose and no other.
Why do they need information about the hostname? Is it really valuable for them to know how many systems are named daves-pc?
Don’t like it, don’t opt in
Even Debian has popcon
There are lots of benefits for developers to gather telemetry.
Don’t like that? Fork and do your own distro (presumably though you don’t contribute anything to open source, so id expect such people to simply whine and get angry at contributors)
Yeah, my only concern here was if it was opt-out. That'd be bad.
Now I completely understand the developer on this. This is useful info to have to help decide future changes/features and general direction, but balancing the right to privacy means this kind of data provision should ALWAYS be opt-in. Microsoft, you hearing me here?
Debian popcon is opt-in, first of all.
popcon.debian.org/FAQ
So no fucking MAC addresses and machine-ids and harddrive serial numbers and stuff.
They only want package statistics, the point being to have statistics about the popularity of packages, mainly so they can be prioritized for the CD/DVD isos. You know, information that actually has a use, not hardware identifiers that can only be used for tracking purposes.
Each popularity-contest host is identified by a random 128bit uuid (MY_HOSTID in /etc/popularity-contest.conf). This uuid is used to track submissions issued by the same host. It should be kept secret.
Oh, and by default, IP, unless usetor is enabled
A machine I’d is just a hash too
Can you explain to me how you track Mac address, serial numbers over the internet.
Just fyi, the backend project I made 20 years ago was hardware related. There’s potential reasons to grab this info…
But, if it is a concern, I’m sure they’d welcome submissions to improve the parsing and allow things to be filtered.
In fact, popcon could be used for digital fingerprinting technically
In all likelihood, op never spoke to the manjaro developers either
That’s insane
I just don’t see a good reason to use Manjaro and many reasons not to.
Friends don’t let friends use Manjaro
Like if you’re going to use Arch btw, go all the way and use actual Arch.
Or if you’re a newbie to Arch, go with Endeavour
I get the usefulness of technical telemetry such as kernel version, RAM, disk space, processor type, etc… but NIC MAC? HDD serial? WTF?
Yeah that makes no sense lol. Who needs MAC addresses to debug and fix bugs? No one.
I said elsewhere, I hope this is just some way to track changes over time per user.
But they need to take an anonymous hash of some non changing data or create an install id that is used for this and nothing else (e.g it identifies a unique user but not the person or hardware behind the user).
Too much identifying info is just pushed around like we shouldn't care, it's become a real problem.
The first three octets of a MAC specify the manufacturer of a NIC chipset. That could come in handy for driver debugging.
Manufacturers and firmware versions of storage devices? You can make the argument; perhaps it would have helped figure out the SSD firmware bugs years ago.
But stuff like whether or not you have video capture card or your current system temperature stats? Nah… that’s getting into “identifiable information as toxic waste” territory.
Yeah, so take the vendor and device id and be done?
Why should they need my unique ID/MAC?
A MAC address isn’t really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn’t; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.
Unique enough with the other hardware IDs
And still, absolutely no reason to go further then the first octets, to have the vendor and device
Or am I missing something?
And I’m currently a happy user of Manjaro since years. But this stuff really isn’t what I want to have on my system …
Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.
I don’t agree with them sending more than the first half either.
All good, just wanted to clarify what I meant
Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as “personal information” under privacy laws.
Serial numbers are hardly covert though… but yeah.
The point is that it’s a loophole in privacy laws so they don’t have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it’s anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don’t actually look into it or understand the implications.
Opt-out? I see it’s time for the seasonal Manjaro fuck up.
They’ll find some way to make this change break the AUR again
Why on earth do they need to know hostname? MAC addresses?
And disk serial numbers 😟
I don’t get why someone would use Manjaro after so many fuckups… If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re either too new to Linux or don’t care. Just look for “manjaro certificates” or “manjaro drama” and you’ll find out for yourself.
Manjaro is already less stable than arch, now it collects your data involuntarily? Fucking wild how anyone can use it.
clown distro makes clown decision
hostname? MAC address? serial numbers? does "partitionx data also include names and GUIDs?
why would they need these? what is wrong with them??
That list about which data they’re collecting is longer than my highschool essay
With archinstall, anybody can install Arch in 10 minutes nowadays. Why use Manjaro ?
To many options? A new user might be confused, by for example choosing a the correct disk layout.
NGL on pretty much any install, I’d end up looking up pros and cons of every filesystem AGAIN…
… It’s BTRFS now. Simple. Easy. Lol
But it was a lotta research to reach that conclusion. So yeah I get that newbie apprehension!
I’ve defended Manjaro many a time, despite the mistakes they’ve made. The main reason for this, Manjaro is the most stable Linux distro I’ve used.
However, the main reason I ditched Windows as my primary OS was telemetry (and bloat). If Manjaro introduce this, it absolutely must be opt-in.
I actually contribute to the Steam hardware survey as I want to ensure Valve, but more so hardware manufacturers, are aware desktop Linux systems for gaming and creative work are viable. But it’s my choice to contribute.
If Manjaro don’t implement this as an opt-in then I’ll be installing Arch. It will be a pain to configure my software again but needs must.
If manjaro is the most stable distro you’ve used you can’t have used a lot
I mostly used Ubuntu based desktop distros and frequently had issues with the 6 monthly update cycle. Problems with Fedora too. I have not had a single update issue with Manjaro. I often have different distros running in VM’s and whilst Arch has been the most reliable, most are not.
I also setup loads of Linux servers in my I.T. job that I used to have, so I have plenty experience.
The bottom line is Manjaro desktop has been ridiculously reliable for me. Therefore other peoples hate of it washes over me and is meaningless.
Yeah, besides some Nvidia driver problems, Manjaro was stable for me as well
Have chosen it, because it was fast to setup and the base configuration wasn’t too of far off my liking
But, by now I’m considering to switch
Yeah the Manjaro devs have a long history of gaffes not to mention the infamous one with PGP keys requiring users to reset their system clock
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Glad i said fuck it and went straight to actual arch when i wanted to try arch based. Literally like 9/10 times i hear manjaro brought up its not going to be in praise. Ffs lol
Once again proven right that EndeavourOS is the superior downstream Arch distro
I moved one of my computers to endeavor, but one is still on manjaro and the contrast is kinda hilarious. Manjaro machine always gets funky after updates, it struggles to deal with sleep and hibernation, and it feels slow even when its like 4x as powerful as my EndeavourOS machine.
Okay why do they need to know that? Why do they need to know if the computer is called “Melissa’s Laptop” or “Workstation 15, Internal security division”? Seems like this kind of data could if stolen be misused and it has minimal legitimate purpose IMO as anyone can put anything as host name and while in organizations it often corresponds to use it doesn’t have to for individuals. Someone could call their machine “Mack’s Porn Rig” and they only use it for doing banking and a little coding.
This all seems legitimate enough, this would be helpful for understanding the hardware their users run on and targeting features or bug fixes.
Not great but there is an argument for it, they could just grab and send the first 3-4 octets which would give them the info they need on manufacturers without getting uniquely identifiable data that along with some of this other stuff is concerning for fingerprinting.
Okay, what the fuck. Why do they need disk serial numbers? What possible use is there for that. Those are used for warranty claims and could be used as part of uniquely fingerprinting a computer and person. Not cool.
This is vague enough. I guess one could choose to see this as just info about partitions in use say if there’s also an NTFS partition that looks like a Windows install that would be useful but on the other hand data encompassed within a partition could also nefariously be read as allowing them access to all your data. Partition layout, partition labels, and file systems used on disks available to the system would be a clearer way to put this and erase any doubt.
All this is also fine just technical data stuff.
Dammit, Manjaro. Why you gotta be WEIRD?! I used to love their branding, but they keep doing crazy things that would clearly alienate the userbase that’s left…