Opensuse and privacy...
 

I watched a video on Opensuse 13.1 and privacy. It sounded great. So I thought I would give it a try. Other than a minor headache with disk partitioning and lvm-luks encryption set up during the install everything went nicely. Booting into the system was great as well. So I thought I would sign up at the Opensuse forums. I went to register and I stopped. Why would they even need my full name, address and phone number? I think I am done with Opensuse. I mean it is a great distro but I just don't feel comfortable with the forum requirements. It makes me wonder what other information they want and get from me without my knowledge or permission. At least I can say no to the forum. And granted I can and have chosen not to use Opensuse. Sad really. I do like the feel, set up and ease of using Opensuse.

That is a really rightful question, why they need all that kind of information? Many people probably feel the same way. To me looks like it is just data mining which is a bad thing, you are not alone in this feeling and you can be sure about that.
There are many reports lately about companies, corporations and governments exploiting this field to collect data, by any means.
As you can see in the following links:
NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software
LG TV phones home with your viewing habits, names of files you screen, even if you tell it not to
US and UK struck secret deal to allow NSA to ‘unmask’ Britons’ personal data

Regards

I agree. I attempted to register a couple of months ago, but decided against it like you did. Asking for an address and phone number is taking it a bit too far for openSUSE message board access. I realize their registration process redirects people to their Enterprise website, SUSE which makes sense if you're paying for SUSE Enterprise services, but not for openSUSE, which is free and community-driven. openSUSE should have a separate and straightforward registration process that doesn't require an address and phone number for message board access.

I've just started using openSUSE 13.1 (my first openSUSE install ever) a couple of months ago when it was in beta. I figured if I had any questions, I'll just ask them here. It also helps that I have a good friend who has used openSUSE religiously since 1998. So far I haven't had any issues crop up with 13.1. At the very least one can browse the official openSUSE forums that might match whatever issues you're having. Otherwise, using LQ (this website) is a nice alternative and more importantly it's free. There are several folks on LQ that use openSUSE and seem knowledgeable enough to help out if you run into any issues.

Therefore you don't have to stop using openSUSE altogether just because you can't access their official forums. LQ is a fine place to ask for help if you run into any issues.

Best of luck!

I was aware of the NSA and what has been happening. I was not aware of LG, I need to look into that some more. This trend is getting worse and it is very disturbing.


I have to wonder what else they are doing. How closely they are monitoring certain things or what they are monitoring. Fedora I feel comfortable with. Debian I feel comfortable with. Both of those distros give me the choices on what I want to share or not share (there are others of course, those two just top my favorites list), though they don't really ask anything much beyond the basics of package surveys and such. But Opensuse, I just don't know what they may be doing. Maybe nothing but I can't be sure of that. Linux I trust. Gnu I trust, there are others as well. I wonder if anyone checks out these things with distro's. The security, what information is gathered during install or updates. Does the distro phone home often, and if it does than with what information? Does Opensuse share this information with any of their partners, such as Microsoft?

I really am not paranoid. I am just sick of the lack of respect many companies have for people and their right to privacy.

Edit: Yes. I do use MS Windows 7. I expect privacy issues and know how to be careful with them and Win7. I use it for a game (yep, one game.) As far as personal accounts, emails and such I use Fedora (Or GNU/Linux in general) for all of that. Well once and awhile you will see me post here at LQ under MS Windows, but LQ is another I do trust, (as well as the Fedora Forums). And granted, nothing is 100% private or secure online. I am talking about what goes above and beyond that.

OpenSUSE
DOSE NOT !!!! control the forum
Novell dose !!!

for instance the opensuse community has been trying to get the ccs used for the font changed

-- you have to turn off the minimal size font used
or use 12 pt fonts

or remove the languages you DO NOT read form the " current topic" search
the "new posts" for the ENGLISH language contain Russian,Chinese,French,....


but Novell controls the opensuse forum , and will NOT change anything

you HAVE to register with Novell to use the opensuse forum
but other than a conformation mail the rest of the info can be fictitious

I understand that this is a Novell requirement. But why would it need to be? And how much control does Novell have if they won't even let the Opensuse community have and run a seperate forum without any interference? For example Red Hat is a business, of course, and Fedora is an opensource part of that. Yet Fedora forums do not require any of this personal information. When I go to Fedora forums I feel comfortable there. They don't ask for my address or phone number. Red Hat doesn't either. Novell itself, I am not attacking Opensuse at all but they are part of Novell, seems to be making some qustionable choices. And they are parners with Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal...collab.aspx#CC) and other companies and I have to wonder if Novell is also a company that shares user data with its partner companies and where does that info go from there? If Opensuse is not part of this than maybe Opensuse should break away from Novell or maybe Novell should take more of an approach like Red Hat does with Fedora.

As I said. I do like Opensuse. I just question things by nature and for this topic I have a lot of questions concerning Novell.

It is indeed disturbing and things are much worder than we probably know, other companies are doing this too,
if you try search things like this you'll start to get an idea how deep this goes.

Question things is a good thing, everyone should do that more often, people is been conditioned to blindly accept what the TV says thinking it is the ultimate truth, unfortunately it is been proved to be the opposite.
So lets question more !!

Reagards

I agree. I wish more people would learn about the history of this world. Even if something wrong is happening and it is not directly interferring with some, it is only a matter of time when it will. All this data mining will one day come around and kick everyone in the butt or their children. We are not the pawns of companies, as well as not being the pawns for other related things. Companies and such can not survive without us and we all need to realize that. But it seems people just don't care.

In part though, I think this happened. There was a time, not that long ago, when we had basic information and we could, or at least thought we could, trust certain people and things. Now, with technology and the internet, the world is a much smaller place and we have massive amounts of information. It can overload our minds if we let it. I think some people haven't mentally evolved or mentally matured enough to understand and sort through it all. So the easiest way to deal with it is just to accept what sounds better or good enough and move on with ones life. I don't mean that in a rude way. It does take time for change to take hold and for us, humans in general, to adapt. We have had a lot of change in just the last 25 years alone. So we get companies and others taking advantage of that for their own purposes, not ours.

I did some more research on Novell. Now I see why I just had a bad feeling about all of this. Yeah. With all due respect to those who use Opensuse this is one distro I will be staying away from. By the way. My favorite distro's, as I have mentioned already, are Fedora and Debian. I have no problem at all with a business having a distro like Red hat does with Fedora. The below is probably old news to some, but I never paid attention to any of this before. Honestly I probably wouldn't have if it wasn't for the Novell forum requirements for the Opensuse forum. I could just imagine what they would have done with my name, address and phone number and any other information they got on me with so many companies/firms involved at so many different levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Attachmate_Group

I also couldn't find any forks of Opensuse. I am not sure if I just missed them or if there is another reason.

It is probably the case why people can't get to face things, it is a lot to processes indeed.

And that is a very good research and clearly show what is really behind opensuse, honestly it isn't the Suse it used to be, that Suse is long dead.
About a fork, you can find at: http://futurist.se/gldt/ -- Timeline
Here the forks(there are others but under Novel as well):
http://linkat.xtec.cat/portal/index.php
http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products...eat-management
http://www.caixamagica.pt/

If I were you, Debian would be my choice, which actualy is !!! Debian Rocks !!!

Regards

I suggest you call me Bob Smith. My phone is 313 555-1254


I never put my real info on the web.

I see a few that forked off when it was still Suse. I am not finding any forks from Opensuse though. I find that interesting since there where forks before Novell and the rest. Of course those forks from Novell, that Novell owns, can't really be considered valid or serious forks. I wonder if there are legal reasons why. I mean Opensuse itself seemed pretty good.

I love Debian as well as Fedora. Currently I am using Debian SID KDE and Fedora KDE 19, soon to be 20 KDE Spin. I installed the Debian testing weekly build iso base and then booted into the command line. Installed kde-full and that was that. Really fast and easy. Than I decided to change the sources list to sid. I would have loved to use Suse. When I first tried Suse it was about 2000 with 7.0, I still have the 600 page Handbook. I think Red Hat was just before or just after that. Than I went on to Mandrake, which has had a fate almost as bad as Suse. At least with Mandrake it forked here and there and finally the Mandriva fork Mageia was born. (For those that don't know, Conectiva+Mandrake=Mandriva) So in a sense the Original Mandrake will never die. Suse, well I'm not really seeing the same thing with that and there is no fork to carry on what Suse use to be.


Exactly. Best way to do it.

By the way. Your phone number is so close to mine. 314-555-1354 ;-) My name, well that would be Mr. Doe. John to my friends and family.

I decided to look around for some of my old Suse install floppies. Found a couple. But I forgot I don't have a floppy drive anymore, not for a very long time. I doubt very much it would work on this computer but I might have been able to get it to work in a VM. Not sure, never tried that.