Fedora Planning A Per-System Unique Identifier For DNF To Count Users

[Britoid]

So what ?
If I don't want to be tracked, of course I don't want to be accurately tracked either.
I I lend a book or a car that I bought to a friend, it's not the manufacturer business to know to whom or how many people I'm lending that thing.
Just because it's a sofware product, it doesn't mean that me and my friend need to be tracked on every usage of that product.
What's left to do, put tracking code in every source code available because we don't know who and how many compiles it ?

I see that a lot of companies made good software without any tracking, but now no, you can't even write 'Hello world!' without some user tracking.
Every bullshit company is jumping on the tracking and datacollection bandwagon.
I'm waiting now on the GDPR v2 to cut this crap.

Except you're not being tracked and you know that, you're just looking for a reason to complain.

[ssokolow]

Define "western" as this isn't a thing in the EU afaik.

Western Hemisphere... as in "Here in North America, we allocated ourselves a larger slice of IPv4 addresses relative to our population before they ran out, so our ISPs are under less pressure to implement carrier-grade NAT and can generally still hand out one-per-account DHCP leases that let you keep the same IP for as long as you leave your DSL/Cable modem running without interruption.

(Which is important because, even if you have an ISP that offers IPv6 without having to get an HE.net tunnel set up, they likely sent you a model of modem-router combo that functions like garbage if you have it in routed mode like most customers and enable IPv6 support.)

[starshipeleven]

Western Hemisphere... as in "Here in North America, we allocated ourselves a larger slice of IPv4 addresses relative to our population before they ran out, so our ISPs are under less pressure to implement carrier-grade NAT and can generally still hand out one-per-account DHCP leases that let you keep the same IP for as long as you leave your DSL/Cable modem running without interruption.

(Which is important because, even if you have an ISP that offers IPv6 without having to get an HE.net tunnel set up, they likely sent you a model of modem-router combo that functions like garbage if you have it in routed mode like most customers and enable IPv6 support.)

Damn 'Murricans hoarding IP addresses.

[uxmkt]

Its a flawed idea and they know it. Quick disposable VMs / containers are going to generate a new UUID and false count a new user.

That isn't actually a problem: Deleted VMs/UUIDs do not generate any downloads anymore, and will be considered "dead" after a statistical grace period.

[skeevy420]

Something like linux-hardware.org
Definitely needed to improve the whole Linux ecosystem hardware wise.

Yeah, but not necessarily just Linux.

[skeevy420]

I'm getting a kick out of all the UUID hate. We don't know how they're going to come up with their UUIDs to know if they're using a method that can be tracked to an individual user.

Y'all would get a kick out of my UUIDs. I do stuff like a1000000-a100-a100-a100-a10000000000 for the first disk in a raid, a2blah-blah becomes the next disk, etc....it makes for easier tab completion.....and remembering passwords.....like, I can use "Horse Battery Staple, a1." for the first disk, "Horse Battery Staple, a2." for the 2nd (complete with commas and periods).

[kgonzales]

Its a flawed idea and they know it. Quick disposable VMs / containers are going to generate a new UUID and false count a new user.

But RedHat know this, they want to start exerting control like all the other crooks.

At most, debians opt-in Pop-con (Popularity Contest) is as far as I will ever trust. And even then I always opt out.

Will be fun watching Fedora fizzle out (Like Ubuntu) whilst blaming "user-interest" rather than their own arrogance.

What's hilarious is that you probably actually believe everything you just typed.

[Awesomeness]

Hehe. Imagine if Canonical made a announcement like this, using the exact same words...

That would be cool. Then people could, for a change, finally verify Shuttleworth's bold statements over Ubuntu's user base size.

But they won't do it. They prefer to make BS user numbers up, just like they only make CLA'ed software they can sell proprietary licenses for.

[F.Ultra]

There is in that this will be information that is going to be transmitted elsewhere. Your example is local.

You where talking about "creating a new type of identity related information" which can only be a problem if a local attacker can fetch that from /etc/os-release (or for some reason not just create such a unique id themselves on your system) or if a man-in-the-middle somehow can connect that uuid with your particular machine. The mac address of your NIC fits both purposes quite nice, especially since you keep broadcasting it on your local LAN.

More importantly there is no connection between _you_ and this UUID so exactly what good is it to a possible attacker to "aha now we have fetched this magic id of '2ff1e0ff-3200-4cfb-a38b-fce9f1eb97c1' from zee interwebs!!!".

[F.Ultra]

How is IP address personal? What ISP aren't aggregating and NATting many users behind the same dynamic IP in 2019?

Don't know, I have had the same "dynamic" external ip on the mobile network that I use for Internet at home for the last 10 years. Of course it could change at any time but to this day it hasn't.