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.

  • naeap
    1·
    14 days ago

    Yeah, so take the vendor and device id and be done?

    Why should they need my unique ID/MAC?

    • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      A MAC address isn’t really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn’t; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.

      • naeap
        2·
        14 days ago

        Unique enough with the other hardware IDs

        And still, absolutely no reason to go further then the first octets, to have the vendor and device

        Or am I missing something?

        And I’m currently a happy user of Manjaro since years. But this stuff really isn’t what I want to have on my system …

        • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          13 days ago

          Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.

          I don’t agree with them sending more than the first half either.

          • naeap
            2·
            13 days ago

            All good, just wanted to clarify what I meant