unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/10/12 09:43, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> On 29 October 2012 22:05, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx 
> <mailto: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.
yes, I fully agree with that, I think the security/privacy concerns are 
overblown in general, my main worry is that if you have a privacy 
feature it should actually work.

> 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.
didn't know that, very interesting, I had no idea that the alt-f2 
results were related to the apps lens. I still think it is confusing 
having the shopping results on the home of the dash without having a 
lens icon that they came from.

Alan.

--
I work at http://libertus.co.uk