this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, built on the basis of Arch Linux and aimed at beginners, announced the beginning of testing a new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics about the system and send it to the external server of the project. The author of the MDD intended to enable telemetry by default (opt-out), but the decision has not yet been approved and, judging by the objections of some developers and users, it is likely that telemetry will be offered as an option requiring prior consent of the user (a request to enable telemetry is proposed to be added to the greeting interface after the first download).

The report includes data such as host name, kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information, network device MAC addresses, disk serial numbers, disk partition data, information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

The sent data is stored on the project server in the ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. The IP addresses of users are not stored, and the hash from the /etc/machine-id file is used as the system identifier.

Аccording to the code https://github.com/manjaro/mdd/blob/master/mdd.py#L40 sends everything.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Each popularity-contest host is identified by a random 128bit uuid (MY_HOSTID in /etc/popularity-contest.conf). This uuid is used to track submissions issued by the same host. It should be kept secret.

Oh, and by default, IP, unless usetor is enabled

A machine I'd is just a hash too

Can you explain to me how you track Mac address, serial numbers over the internet.

Just fyi, the backend project I made 20 years ago was hardware related. There's potential reasons to grab this info..

But, if it is a concern, I'm sure they'd welcome submissions to improve the parsing and allow things to be filtered.

In fact, popcon could be used for digital fingerprinting technically

In all likelihood, op never spoke to the manjaro developers either