anikin wrote:I understand your irony on the educational part. What you'd expect from noobs.
Please, conveying irony is very far from my intention. I do learn a lot from this thread, I do learn a lot from noobs, and lastly we were all noobs once.
The pesky connection is built to the highest standards of reliability.
The files are spread across the system in at least 3 different folders. If one fails, there are 2 more to keep the connection alive and the customers happy.
Jokes aside, I would say that malice was never the intention. Security (and to a degree privacy) is always a trade-off (with functionality, with convenience, etc); and everyone has different ideas on where the dividing line should be. See for example:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 815#534815 - would you want to keep track of your external IP address movement, *at the price of contacting icanhazip several times a day*? I don't think so, but others think differently (=ie no big deal for them).
That being said - the 3 different ways of connection comes from 3 different packages. ipinfo is from Woof (Barry); ipwget is from firewallstate (tasmod); and ifactive comes from Pup-Info (radky). Some puppies have all these three, and some gets two, some only has one (ipinfo). So no, they don't come from the same source or collude to hide their tracks in 3 different programs.
The one that concerns the most ("calling-icanhazip-at-boot") comes from firewallstate. While I don't know how firewallstate is designed (doesn't have the source with me), I would bet that it is more of an oversight rather than on purpose: tasmod explicitly mentioned the exact script that gets the external IP address for use by firewallstate in his response here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 460#535460; something that he wouldn't have done if he has less than honourable intention.
I believe Mick has addressed all of these 3; and this matter should be put to rest. As I said earlier, you can eliminate the "calling-icanhazip-at-boot" by deleting /usr/local/firewallstate/ipwget until a more permanent fix is released.
One last note for the technically curious: it is nearly impossible to reliably determine what is your external IP address to the world, other than actually *contacting* a site of some sort (as Mick has explained earlier).
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