people are mistaken thinking that these kind of things/tools/options are "spy" thing... a lot of lunatic ideas going on in mdl forum these days of windows 10 release..
Not that difficult... A general comment: It's nice to see the new generation Linux user coming through...Don't let those intent on CLI and stuck in the dark ages put you off...
What is Zeitgeist? Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, ... aka spyware
Disable it. For paranoid. Spoiler Code: sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop-inactive rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel mkdir ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel rm -rf ~/.local/share/zeitgeist
i don't really care what it logs, i don't want it on my system if those logs already exist, what's the purpose of creating zeitgeist?
this is an ugly hack that prevents REcreation of the recently-used.xbel log, the problem you have after that is you get a boatload of errors in another log file every time system tries to write to that log, why is there no command/option to disable the log? perfect example of how linux is slowly but surely becoming win10
MS starting from Vista has a feature called NCSI(Network Connectivity Status Indicator) where it performs DNS lookups(on MS domains) and fetches a text file(from MS website). Is that calling home, too? Is that a spy service, too? Personally, if you are a first timer and made up your mind that you had to use Linux, I'd recommend Ubuntu Desktop. Once you are more comfortable with that, you can start looking around for other options.
recently-used.xbel is part of how GTK works for GTK applications. There are more advanced ways to disable it than this, but here's an easy way: Code: user@linux: echo "" > ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel user@linux: sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel I don't see any harm in recently-used-xbel. If someone gets physical access to your machine, or gets access through a rootkit, it's all over anyway. If you are using drive encryption like LUKS, then you wouldn't have to worry about it.
i have no doubt about it thank you, tho i'm positive it works, it does pretty much the same thing the other hack does, aka prevents writes to the log file but it won't disable logging service and it will not stop errors in other log file, (i think the kernel log, dont remember exactly) well you might no see the harm, the question i have however is: who are they writing the system for? for the users(aka us) or for google and nsa?
Isn't that exactly what NSA is supposed to do? If such is the line of argument, then one might very well say that OpenSSL Heartbleed was handiwork of NSA.
If you are talking about Ubuntu/Canonical then they are going to make it so that they can make money off of it, which IMO is fine as long as your not tracking/spying/data mining and selling that to third parties. Like Canonical is doing.