Hey stqmts+5ehe03cek0yy8,
Post by stqmts+I hope it's not relevant here that the package maintainer of visidata in
debian is also the upstream author, and this phoning home provides upstream
with some sort of revenue stream, and this is why this bug hasn't been
dealt with yet...
The creator of VisiData goes into great depth here about his decision to
enable motd by default: https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues/913
The privacy page is here: https://www.visidata.org/privacy/.
In particular: VisiData fetches the list of startup messages with a single
HTTP GET. The first time each day that VisiData is used, it downloads a
single small file. This access is also logged by the website.
This network request can be turned off by adding options.motd_url=None to
your ~/.visidatarc.
This daily count of users is what keeps us working on the project, because
otherwise we have feel like we are coding into a void. There are some
extremely dedicated users who talk to us about how much they love the
project, and engage with us, but by-and-large we only found out people were
using it when they were unhappy with something. Knowing that there is a
steady increase of people using it, motivates me to fix bugs in my evenings
after a full day at my day-job.
Post by stqmts+In my case, visidata was phoning home while working on GDPR data...
You don't have to worry! Your GDPR data is perfectly safe. You can look at
the code, it is all open source:
https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/blob/develop/visidata/motd.py. It just
does an HTTP Get. The process to get a package accepted into Debian was
brutal. The user @geekscrapy is extremely privacy conscious, and he did
tell us that he made the choice to turn motd off, but otherwise has not
voiced to us any concerns. He hangs out in the VisiData discord, if you
wanted to chat any further about your concern: bluebird.sh/chat. Also, in
case this matters to you, we wrote about any occurrences of swap files
here: https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues/140.
I read that you are also concerned about any behind the scenes revenue.
VisiData has no revenue stream.
Saul, as a creator, has a github sponsors:
https://github.com/sponsors/saulpw and a patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/saulpw/posts. People sponsor if they want to
support his work, and no other reason. Examples of something that patreon
money has supported is paying a web developer to build a better-looking
website for VisiData.
Post by stqmts+Package: visidata
Version: 2.11-1
Followup-For: Bug #1001647
This bug still exists in the version of visidata released with debian bookworm.
Debian users do not expect software provided through debian to be phoning
home for reasons unrelated to the function of the software. In my case,
visidata was phoning home while working on GDPR data...
Normally, package maintainers in debian patch out this functionality
before releasing the software to users. Please do so.
I hope it's not relevant here that the package maintainer of visidata in
debian is also the upstream author, and this phoning home provides upstream
with some sort of revenue stream, and this is why this bug hasn't been
dealt with yet...
Debian Release: 12.1
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-10-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
ii python3 3.11.2-1+b1
ii python3-dateutil 2.8.2-2
ii python3-importlib-metadata 4.12.0-1
visidata recommends no packages.
visidata suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information