unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 29 October 2012 22:05, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Alan,

I don't have any particular comment on the implementation of the "privacy"
as I haven't been involved in that  - but there's a technical tidbit I do
have something to attach to:

 SNIP This leads on to the thought that an evil genius could write a
> lens/scope that is invisible, and presents no results, but listens to the
> global search query change event and sends every keystroke out to the
> internet, regardless of the privacy preference setting. This is bad. I
> don't see any valid use-case for a lens to set the visible property to
> false.
>

Firstly - if you can run a process under a given user, that user is
basically screwed for all intents and purposes. That is - at least until
Ubuntu implements a rigorous apparmor sandboxing of *all* processes. Which
is a huge task, that I don't know the state of (if it even has a "state"
:-)). IOW - hiding a lens in order to log global search keystrokes is the
*least* of your worries.

Secondly - hiding a lens does certainly have very good practical use. It's
fx. being utilized in the apps lens to back the queries for the Alt-F2 run
dialog iirc. The unity-lens-applications process actually houses two
lenses, one hidden for alt-f2, another the normal apps lens. This saves
considerable amounts of memory because they can share caches and indexes.

Cheers,
Mikkel