There is some mileage to this argument - the search box doesn't really pretend to be local-only. But for the last three releases (from when Unity was introduced), it was only a local search, and I think many users expected it to stay that way. It's also somewhat uncomfortable that the easiest way to launch an application or open a file is to do an online search.

For me, it's annoying, and I've turned it off in the settings. But it's not such a big deal that I want to fork Ubuntu, or even switch distro.

"stop with the hyperbole that is actually misleading to readers about what the real situation is"

I wonder if readers do really understand the situation or not. I don't think the hyperbole is a bad idea when features like these should be opted in and not a default for everybody. I don't know if this feature is properly advertised by the system and if there will be someone that didn't know about it.

I'm a happy 12.04 user and, since it's LTS, I'll avoid 12.10 until this issue is sorted out.

I think Canonical has been appropriately forward with discussion of what the situation is, and who gets information. I think it's an awful idea — who really wants commercial results built into their desktop? — but calling it spyware is disingenuous.

I also think it'll kill adoption of Ubuntu. It made me adopt a different distribution, and I think it will cause others to do the same.

> who really wants commercial results built into their desktop?

The distinction between the desktop and the Internet is going away. Some argue that "the desktop is dead"; I just think that it'll get more integrated.

I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, providing that you have adequate control over your own privacy settings and have a choice of providers (both large and small). An open source project that is promised to always remain so is the safest place for this, since you'll always be able to find instructions to turn things off if the defaults don't suit you.

I much prefer this over the world switching to web-based hosted solutions for everything.

In fact it turns out that 12.04 has some lens making queries to different services when I was searching stuff using the dash, and I didn't know about it.

I fixed it with: sudo apt-get remove unity-scope-musicstores unity-lens-video unity-lens-music

(I couldn't find how to disable it)

It's not like I agreed to this when I installed the system, because I upgraded from a previous version (and a previous version, etc), and that behaviour wasn't there.

I don't know how Canonical could advertise these changes, but in the Amazon lens case I think RMS did it right.

You can disable it via the GUI in the Privacy settings: http://askubuntu.com/a/192270/235

I said 12.04 and not 12.10. There's no way of disabling the lens I removed in 12.04 (may be because they got introduced in that release).

EDIT: at least I couldn't find a way to disable them. Nothing in privacy settings and nothing with dconf-editor.

rms is being....well, rms in that article.

But if more among us adopted this nuance, it will kill most arguments before they are raised. :-)

Well put.

if you type something in to the search box, and get search results from the internet it is pretty immediately clear that your search string is being sent to the internet. If you can't make that connection, you also likely don't understand the potential privacy risk in having your search strings sent to the internet.

I've yet to hear any valid argument as to why the amazon search is bad that doesn't revolve around some mythical user who is clueless about how computers work, unable to make logical assumptions, and also incredibly privacy conscious.

>"People will certainly make a modified version of Ubuntu without this surveillance."

I've been using Cinnamon, Mint Linux's alternative to Unity, and I find it's Dash-like launcher works better anyway. Using Cinnamon also, strangely, fixed an audio issue I'd been too lazy to troubleshoot.

http://www.itworld.com/software/307138/install-cinnamon-desk...

Yes, using find and grep won't trigger a network search (unless of course it's on an NFS server or something like that)

They're on it. :)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bu...

I hate to point out the obvious, but for people who don't click the link: that bug was filed in irony (and by somebody who didn't "get" the home lens as a global search tool, but that perceptual problem is ours more than it is anybody else's). The global search functionality could be queried from the commandline (by writing a tool that talked to the backends over dbus, as the dash does), and I half expect somebody to implement a kludgy version of "grep" that did exactly that, it is in no way something we're going to ever ship.

"Desktop" users, of the kind that Ubuntu wants to adopt, aren't going to be using find and grep.