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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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 month 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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[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

My point is that systemd did not have to be built at all. It’s an abomination that goes directly against the original philosophy of Linux creating a monolithic monstrosity to replace individual and composable programs that used to be the way init works. Now, everything is tied to it and it’s become like a cancer in a linux system that’s inoperable.

amen and try sharing this view on c/linux or c/privacy. lol

i struggle to understand why both communities are such fervent systemd and proton supporters when other similar communities on other lemmy instances aren't.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the justification for systemd. The only real argument I've seen is that it standardizes the process, but that could've been done as a spec where you define a common config format, lifecycle, etc., and then keep the actual utilities decoupled from each other, but behaving in a uniform way.

[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't have any opinions or positions on it but I know Benno Rice (if you're familiar with FreeBSD, any) gave a talk regarding systemd a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

thanks that's a good talk