I agree with Mark that it's not worth beating up Canonical over a bureaucratic slip up. Latching on to simple mistakes that are the result of internal miscommunication and misinterpretations of policy is foolish. And ideologues (especially in the software world) love to do that blindly, but it's not intelligent discourse.
That being said, I don't think that absolves Canonical of the underlying criticism: your company is active pushing a product, despite its open-source-ness, that betrays the trust and privacy of your users unless they're informed enough about the situation to opt-out.
I know Canonical is a corporation and has to generate revenue. I won't sit and pretend like I know how to solve that problem for your company. It doesn't change the dilemma, however. I'd like to recommend a user-friendly Linux to my friends and family. I won't recommend Ubuntu until the privacy issue is opt-in instead of opt-out. In fact, if they're less-technical, I recommend iPads and Macs. At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of. I hold enough trust with Apple to believe that they are not. It's unfortunate that I can't say the same for Canonical.
"At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of"
Care to wager what Apple resells your desktop/iphone/iPad search results for? I'm guessing it's on the order of 100 million dollars/year. Certainly more than 10 million dollars.
unless there is something new in the latest release of osx 10.9, what on earth are you talking about?
Also, apple sells google the right to be the default search engine on ios (see eg [1]); this is very different than selling your search queries or results. For instance, when you get a google results page, only the very stupidest could be unaware that, well, google knows what you searched for.
That is bad on so many levels - privacy, security, network performance, etc... Presumably every time I do one of those searches, traffic is sent over my internet connection...
I wonder what's going through Canonical's mind - And why they think this is a good idea...
The idea is to join your offline and online worlds. Maybe you don't remember if you had that file on your desktop or google drive or dropbox or ubuntu one. The unfortunate part is that online searches were launched with just Amazon, which makes it look like a money grab, when it was intended just to help the user keep their worlds in order. More online scopes will launch soon, and it'll be a lot more obvious that this is just trying to make your life better.
Yes, Canonical also makes a tiny bit of money for the Amazon integration, but that was not the driving factor behind the feature as a whole. There will be more online scopes to come, and the hope is to make your life easier, by not having to remember exactly where you put all your stuff.
Also, you can easily turn off all online searches with a single toggle inside Settings -> Security and Privacy -> Search.
Canonical knows there is a lot of heat around the feature, and they're not ignoring that, despite what it may seem like from the outside.
bs. companies implement the most important things first. now maybe canonical is running to implement searching other stuff as a fig leaf -- oh guys, no wait, we weren't just doing this to sell your local searches to advertisers. but if that weren't the purpose dropbox and google drive would have been the first implementations.
It's just a bunch of bureaucrats in a room. They've got their Standard Operating Procedures, and react accordingly. They're just cogs, and all the real decisions come from the higher ups. All the hardware in that room is procured and maintained through IT contractors and there is no software on those machines that wasn't listed when they wrote those ~5 year long contracts.
Impressive presentation, if you're trying to show off. Terrible otherwise, and the content is just dumb. David Kushner has always struck me as one of those superficial tech journalists who writes about it all the time, but largely avoids attempting to explain the important technical details to the audience well. He's either dumbing it down on purpose because he thinks his audience will be easily confused, or he really has a meager understanding himself. Regardless, I don't think he's doing his audience a service when he puts this 'Hackerz-are-l33t' theme on this article like he's submitting a screenplay to Hollywood.
He's basically like the 'Smykowski' character from Office Space; trying to justify his job ("I talk to the engineers so you don't have to!"), but in the end, he's not really doing anything.
This is an important topic and it deserves to be treated much more seriously. I feel embarrassed for Rolling Stone here. It's style over content and the fancy animations are just compensating for an otherwise shallow article.
Can't wait for all the wannabe-startup-bros to start throwing those terms around now when they're looking for coders. "Hey man, wanna come forked on my awesome new idea? Send me your pull request and let's get started!"
The NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people huh? Worried that they might be acting against the NSA's best interest? Weird! I can't possibly imagine how they feel! Nope, not at all! It's not like I have a secretive government agency stockpiling of much of communications as they can get their hands on that could one day be taken out of context and used against me or something. Crazy!
