Comment 13 for bug 423856

>> Just because I trust my data to Amazon does not mean that I'm comfortable
>> sharing my data with the rest of the world. That's the "trust" part.
> This is a pretty misleading statement.

Without the context, yes.

> The mechanism does not send *your data* anywhere, and the query is a
> read-only query made against an API in Canonical's data center specifically,
> including just the image version to see if it's out-of-date or not, and this
> image version is the same for all users of the same image. This is very
> different from "sharing my data with the rest of the world".

I did not make the comparison.

> The comparison with EC2 was made specifically because it sounds silly to be
> worried about such a mechanism when Amazon knows so much about exactly what
> is being done and by whom.

Right. There's no way they could provide the service they do without having a
way of knowing these things. That's the nature of running virtual machines on
someone else's hardware. There most definitely is a way to run a free
operating system on said hardware without feeding information back to the
provider of said operating system.

> If you want do publish this elsewhere and ask for opinions, please do so.

I'd prefer it if there was nothing to discuss.

> If you want to suggest a different approach that would enable people to know
> there are new images (customized or not) in EC2 and Eucalyptus which might be
> realistically put in place, please do so as well.

A simple directory structure holding information about the current image,
kernel, and ramdisk ID's, mirrored onto our release or archive mirrors.
This would provide instances information about what is current. They can fetch
this, compare to themselves and decide that they're out of date.

Something like this:

  http://people.canonical.com/~soren/ec2-version-query/current/

..only with different identifiers. The mirroring would provide same level of
privacy as apt-get.

> If you think this is a terrible idea and that it should be shot down and
> replaced by nothing because no one cares about image upgrades, speak up.

Can we keep the false dichotomies to a minimum, please?