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Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linu

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Moltke
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Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linu

#1 Post by Moltke »

Hi everyone! Hope you're ll having a nice life! :)
In a recent update, the Raspberry Pi OS installed a Microsoft apt repository on all machines running Raspberry Pi OS without the person’s or admin’s knowledge. Every time a Raspbian device is updated by having this repo, it will ping a Microsoft server.
I don't own a Raspberry, but still...
https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/he ... -linux-os/

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#2 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Disgraceful but hardly surprising given how blob-ridden the hardware is in the first place.
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#3 Post by Deb-fan »

Fire's hot, water's wet and MS is pretty craptastic. What else is new but its the same all over too. Stopped using MS many years ago for several reasons, moral/ethical and technical. Main one being they can't touch what gnu/linux and open source offers people.

Would devote more time being disgusted by what MS and many others do but it takes too much energy. I've come to consider all manner of things such as this an integral part of technology, take the good with the bad or turn off all our gadgets and digital goodies. :P
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#4 Post by golinux »

I guess we are are now in the "Extinguish" phase.
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#5 Post by stevepusser »

The distro it comes with is Raspian, right?

Hmmm, some of the MX devs are in the process of creating a Fluxbox edition of MX for the Pi. I've been able to set up MX cross-compile armhf build environments in pbuilder and sbuild, but there seems to be an unavoidable ten times slowdown in the emulation, so something that might take a half hour to build for x86 takes 5-6 hours for armhf. Another packager has their own Pi for compiling the smaller packages, too.
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#6 Post by Deb-fan »

So many concerned in the open source community are saying people need to shut their pi-holes? That makes much sense. It was in the article and now I won't be able to get it outta my head. Will be trying to work in comments about people's pi-holes for awhile going forward.

People please watch what you're putting in your pi-holes, also what's coming out of them too. DAM U MS!!!
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#7 Post by Moltke »

According to some users in the comments, in the article I mean, it isn't "as bad as it seems".
The distro it comes with is Raspian, right?
Raspian? No. It does come with Raspbian. #just a joke., sorry, couldn't help it :lol:
From the article:
It comes with Debian Linux based modified operating system called Raspbian

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#8 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

golinux wrote:I guess we are are now in the "Extinguish" phase.
Not yet (IMO) - I think it's still the "Embrace" phase, excluding some stolen projects which are now in the "Extend" phase.

The world have changed since year 1995, and today Microshit is no longer a dictator - and they know this.
Linux-based systems are ubiquitous - starting from intelligent fridge, wash machines, cars and ending with supercomputers - Microshit have lost the battle of the world' domination - this is a fact.
What they can still do, is to pollute FreeSoftware/OpenSource world with their shitty software - using various tricks, like VSCode telemetry, they can still make money by selling user's (meta)data.

Today Microcrap is not more dangerous than Facepalm or Google - i.e. We have a problem with few corporations, which became more powerful than governments, and which have the power to take control of or destroy the Democracy, or in longer perspective - our world, as we know it.

What's really (not-so)funny in this context, the corporations are in fact illegal:
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate- ... ations-us/
(just an example - there are hundreds of similar sites)
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#9 Post by Danielsan »

This is a very bad attitude and from time to time we see IT companies doing stupid stuff like that, updating shouldn't change your setup, and they should alert about that. The issue looks like is related with the unattended-upgrade which should be used to install security updates and not modifications to the system configuration, at this point you can't trust anymore the PI foundation...

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#10 Post by reinob »

I noticed a few days ago while updating my Raspberry Pi 3, which runs raspbian (now "Raspberry OS").
It's the repo for Visual Studio Code.

For me it was a big WTF moment, since I wouldn't have expected that without any sort of question or announcement.
I also have a Raspberry Pi 4, but that one uses pure Debian, and as one would expect, no repo was "injected".

(I also have a Rasperry Pi 1 running NetBSD :)

For raspbian, I plan to remove the raspberry-sys-mods package (or whatever it's called), which is the one responsible. It's postinstall script is a nightmare. Or switch to pure Debian altogether..

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#11 Post by Hallvor »

If you use Raspberry Pi OS, you are trusting that we make good decisions about who to trust. In this case, to support our goal of delivering a better experience to our users, we have made the decision to trust Microsoft.


https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... t&start=25

:roll:
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#12 Post by Deb-fan »

Do think there's a couple clear takeaways from this situation.

A big one being use actual Debian vs based on. Plenty of good Debian based distro's but even those with honorable intentions still aren't going to have a fraction of the knowledge, skill, competence, resources and experience of all those officially associated with the Debian project itself. Some others have clear commercial motivations, are for profit and not even saying that's a bad thing, it's accepted even encouraged by the terms of the GPL and similar. I know that gnu/Linux wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is without attracting commercial interest. People who founded all of this knew that and never made a secret about it either.

Still think this type of thing does bring the Pi foundation's integrity into question, am assuming this new found trust of MS came along with some payment, again imo not necessarily a bad thing, all of these technology projects do require effort and resources, open source developers can't eat the open source code they create, can't pay the electric bill with it either but the deceptive way these people apparently chose to go about it, including this without user approval or notice, as if trying to sneak something in is a wee craptastic. For me personally long ago made the decision to get my Debian supplied directly from the source, pure Debian.

Now back to screwing with the whacknuts, errrr, yep the situation is dire fella's, think it's all over now. Everytime someone with an affected Raspbian OS refreshes pkgs MS will almost instantly be aware of it via these treasonous pings. Armed with this incredible insight we'll probably all be enslaved pretty soon, may as well get used to calling Bill Gates master, dammit !!!

Would you like some coffee master Gates, a pillow perhaps master Gates, should I walk your dogs again master Gates, a nice foot rub master Gates ... DAM U MS !!! :P
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#13 Post by craigevil »

On my new PI400 the MS repo was added but was commented out.
No biggie. It has VScode which I guess is a complex coding app. Me I haven't a clue how to code.
Yes they should have made an announcement. Personally I think people are freaking out for no real reason.

Contents of sources.listd:
docker.list
raspi.list
vscode.list

It does say it was automatically added though. Which I guess is what is stressing people out.

Code: Select all

THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
#deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf] http://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code/ stable main 
BTW nice to be back. :D
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#14 Post by reinob »

@craigevil,

Are you sure the repo was #commented out?
Yesterday I updated a raspberry pi 400 and I got this:

Code: Select all

# cat vscode.list 
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf] http://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main
Other than that, regardless of who may or may not freak out about this (vscode is a text editor which runs in an embedded browser..), I find it highly impolite from Raspberry that they add this repo without any prior information.

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#15 Post by Deb-fan »

WARNING, more dorkish ramblings follow, not into dorkish ramblings ? Scroll now. :D

Have come across or expounded about many MS conspiracy theories, many what I consider to be proven, if there's enough supporting facts to establish xyz-party engaged in whatever unethical, immoral or even outright illegal activity then it becomes less of a theory and more of a yeah whoever did something crappy for financial gain and self interest. Same time in this context that's called business, how it works, as it has forever. Corporations do buy out or otherwise snuff out competitors, they do bribe and pass out large sums of money to people in political positions in return for favorable treatment.

Microsoft has done it's share, been sued and sanctioned many times over the years and are still a megatech Corporation. One of my real pet peeve issues with them is something I call murder by proxy and it involves some pretty twisted thinking, looking at things in a way not many would, even those involved, they may reasonably enough just be considering something they're doing as strictly business. A small percentage within the particular enterprise that even knows, we're doing something crappy, yes we know it's not quite legal but it works, we beat the other people, are going to make more money and be in a better position to keep doing so = SUCCESS.

What someone may ask is murder by proxy ? Last time I checked(a long time ago)MS was reporting like 90billion in annual earnings and around 10% of that came from US government contracts for software + support alone. That pisses me off, why in the fark should my country's government pay 9bil to this corporation when better software is available for free ? Keep seeing it reported that 1/3 or so of the people (edit: make that 1 in 10 or so, still A LOT) in this country have food insecurity, don't know where the next meal is coming from and 9billion is a lot of money to hand over to MS vs putting those resources into public health services, social support, education etc and the US and everybody like myself are some of the luckiest on the planet when it comes to this type of thing.

Thank my lucky stars I was born here, where people are free to take for granted many things others elsewhere couldn't dream of doing. Many places many people may have a hard time finding drinking water that's safe. But if in giving MS that huge amount of money, people are actually dying as a result somewhere in the country, then in my twisted view it's indirectly murdering them (by proxy)because the resources to prevent that death are available, only decision is wrongly made to devote it elsewhere. Yes you can be sure MS spends a nice chunk of money in Washington DC in the form of special interests, lobbying and passing out campaign contributions to influencial people in politics.

That's business, so folks may wish to look into this type of thing, if you're one of those fortunate to even be living in one of the 1st world nations, could want to ask how much cash your governmental bodies are spending or giving to MS for software, when there's an ocean of open source which is not only free of licensing costs but also better software just sitting waiting to be used instead.

On a positive note, all the people who have made all this awesome technology a reality only need to keep doing what they do, keep maintaining or developing awesome software and in time more people are bound to start using it, more people becoming aware of what's going on.

Also Bill Gates is apparently the founder of one of the biggest charity foundations on Earth, said to have 45bil in assets and doing much that's of benefit to humanity. Only saying as usual, majority of the time it's never simple, simple views are for simple minded people. So it'd be ridiculous to say MS is composed of pure concentrated evil, or that Bill Gate's and all the people who work for MS are robots from the quaqmire dimension plotting to enslave us all, that's insane nonsense. Would make for a possbily entertaining movie though. :) I made my choice, I don't need Windows(any version) in my daily computing life and why would I bother with Debian available ?

If I ever do get into the Pi revolution, it'll have pure Debian running on it. I don't need some distro maintainer deciding which windows manager, taskbar or file-manager I should be using on my pi. You want a piece of the Pi ? Go get your own, this one's mine kind of thing. :)
Last edited by Deb-fan on 2021-03-01 18:14, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#16 Post by Hallvor »

I have a first generation Raspberry Pi, model B. It has been online pretty much 24/7/365 since 2012. It doesn't even have a GUI. Still, a new repository was added with no notification whatsoever.

Their explanation was even more insulting, basically that users were too stupid to work out how to add the repository for themselves, in case they wanted it, so everyone got it.

Clowns.

Thank goodness for https://raspi.debian.net/
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#17 Post by pendrachken »

All the people whining about this are stupid. Raspbian / Raspberry OS decided they wanted a dev environment for their DEV BOARDS, and decided on VSCode. Deal with it.

To add further insult to injury here, the same idiots whining about having an APT repo added, would have been whining that there was no way to get security or bug updates to VSCode since there was no repository for it. And apparently don't care that the exact same info gets sent to the owners of the Raspberry repos, which are also a business. :roll: :roll: :roll:
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#18 Post by craigevil »

pendrachken wrote:All the people whining about this are stupid. Raspbian / Raspberry OS decided they wanted a dev environment for their DEV BOARDS, and decided on VSCode. Deal with it.

To add further insult to injury here, the same idiots whining about having an APT repo added, would have been whining that there was no way to get security or bug updates to VSCode since there was no repository for it. And apparently don't care that the exact same info gets sent to the owners of the Raspberry repos, which are also a business. :roll: :roll: :roll:
Pretty much my viewpoint as well.
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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#19 Post by Moltke »

pendrachken wrote:All the people whining about this are stupid. Raspbian / Raspberry OS decided they wanted a dev environment for their DEV BOARDS, and decided on VSCode. Deal with it.

To add further insult to injury here, the same idiots whining about having an APT repo added, would have been whining that there was no way to get security or bug updates to VSCode since there was no repository for it. And apparently don't care that the exact same info gets sent to the owners of the Raspberry repos, which are also a business. :roll: :roll: :roll:
That's all fine but couldn't they at least notify that said repo would be added and give users the option whether they want it to or not? I don't own a Raspberry device and use VSCodium, the appimage, no MS repo is needed to keep it updated. No telemetry either. Works great and most VSC extensions are available too. https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/re ... tag/1.53.0

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Re: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s

#20 Post by Hallvor »

I think most of these "idiots" were unhappy with an unacknowledged third party potentially getting unrestrained root access to their systems, merely by running an upgrade. :lol:
Last edited by Hallvor on 2021-02-09 21:18, edited 1 time in total.
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