I’ve been reading this blog post. (titled “Heads up: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS”)
The headline by itself already sets the tone for what’s next in the article. First, repositories added by default in the OS are not considered as “secret”. I’ll however give a pass to that headline as rhetoric/regular overblown speech in the political world.
First off, the OS images from Raspberry Pi notably ship with repositories (and even bundled software) that are proprietary… such as Wolfram Mathematica too. These are intended to give a better out-of-the-box experience to users. If you don’t want those tools, you always have the option to not install.
If you or any family members logged into the MS ecosystem such as Github, Bing, Office/Live, they could identify and track you when using same shared public IP at home.
For access to an APT repo, this quote from the article is very overblown.
Which leads us to the second part of the article… claiming that CDN accesses compromise privacy. So does visiting any website. It’s trying to appeal to fear.
That is what malware does, and hence Linux and the opensource community are upset
This is straight in fear, uncertainty and doubt territory.
And then it goes crazy. Just no. This is not malware by any stretch. By using such a ludicrous argument, the article itself becomes FUD. Such tactics do not help the cause at all and are beyond counterproductive.
Stop doing this, it doesn’t help and makes everything that is said there have no credibility whatsoever. Emotional appeal like this is just utter garbage. It also supposes that proprietary software is outright immoral (the only thing that would justify such a strong reaction) and tries to force that judgement down to everyone.