I was unable to find a sticky notes app in Slackware current,
so I tried running akonadi, which claims to be a notes application.
To my dismay, it seems to have started scanning all my files
while establishing numerous connections to cloud servers.
I shut my wifi and akonadi app down, but like any good piece of spyware it had
many processes that remained running that required killing.
Very dangerous software, it seems. Why is this a part of Slackware?

No it's not spyware, you may want to read this: https://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi
and this may be what you were looking for: https://kde.org/applications/utilities/org.kde.knotes

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I think you are mistaken. One of the connections it made was to Facebook:

inetnum: 31.13.64.0 - 31.13.127.255
netname: IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
country: IE

Also, after I deleted akonadi executables, KNotes will not launch without complaining about akonadi being missing. After deleting the akonadi libraries, KNotes will not run at all.

But most KDE programs that I've tried do run without akonadi.

I can't say whether or not it's spyware or not. However, I will NOT allow it to run on my Slack. It's a resource hog.

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That too. Not sure why it is provided. Maybe everything from KDE assumed to be good quality code and benign?

I've had nothing to do with KDE since v3.5. However, I doubt Akonadi is spyware. It's more like "organize-ware". I don't need it on my system, though...

It is most likely provided because Slackware aims to provide upstream as upstream intends. You are not required to run akonadi, but it is used in many KDE applications for managing personal information. If you disable/remove it, it may break portions of KDE.

As for the Facebook connection, a little googling will show that it is used to sync contacts, events, notes, and messages from Facebook. The code for the Facebook connections is actually a part of kdepim-runtime. I'm not willing to dig in deep enough, but it is possible that akonadi is not needed for the Facebook connections to occur in certain applications (or it might be impossible and only works through akonadi).

It may be worth seeing if the same Facebook connections occurs on Plasma5 with akonadi and if so, reach out to the KDE devs and see if it is intentional even without a Facebook account setup to sync. It could very well already be fixed in Plasma5 since KDE4 has been EOL for quite some time now.

Why isn't Slackware current using Plasma5?

Anyway if I had an outgoing firewall this wouldn't be quite so worrisome, because then I'd block the sketchy stuff, but without that the idea that any of my personal data might be stolen and sent to FB or someone's cloud is alarming.

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Ah, here is the notes program I was originally looking for:

xfce4-notes-plugin

It won't build without something called unique.

@Framu

You should maybe wrap akonadi in tape, learn from "the experts":
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...rs-spying.html

Well, it should be expected that young (&retarded) developers are making their way into the FOSS world, due to the generation change. It scares me too how naive/brainwashed some of them are and I'm actively taking protective security measures.

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I can't answer that question. It's been the question of a lot of people for some time now. However, with the recent advancements in -current and some comments from Pat, it seems that he will likely be switching it to Plasma5 and Xfce 4.14 within the next few weeks.

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You should read some of the other threads.

I do not doubt there is a TCP connection between your machine and a potential facebook server, although I'd like to know the command/process you used to find that out. (Not because I doubt you but because I would like to check my own machine which is running akonadi under Slackware64 14.2.)

I'll point out that the name of a server may not align with what it is actually doing; it could (and I stress could) be doing something worse than giving data to FaceBook. (I am no friend of FaceBook and do not have an account with those fuckers. Nonetheless, there could be a server whose FQDN contains the phrase "facebook" to make people not suspect anything is wrong with connecting to it.)

I did do a search on the github repo that @bassmadrigal provided a link to, and the string "face" didn't match anything. So, I'm not sure what's going on, but I have a minor itch to find out.

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It's on SBo, you can install it from there (there is also the dependency libunique on SBo).

Try this.

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Are there other lists that reside there?