Bug 711822 - vino makes unexpected network accesses
Summary: vino makes unexpected network accesses
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: vino
Version: 14
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Søren Sandmann Pedersen
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2011-06-08 16:03 UTC by John Sullivan
Modified: 2014-06-18 09:14 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2012-08-16 15:45:33 UTC
Type: ---


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description John Sullivan 2011-06-08 16:03:46 UTC
vino-2.32.2-1.fc14.x86_64

While playing around with the Remote Desktop Preferences dialog tracking down other issues, I noticed the network reachability message. Wondering how it worked I started digging into that.

Turns out that it makes xmlrpc calls to URLs contained in /usr/share/vino/webservices which contains:

    # Jorge Pereira
    http://blog.jorgepereira.com.br/jorge/org.gnome.vino.Service.php

    # Jonh Wendell
    http://www.bani.com.br/vino/vino.php

This was unexpected! Not I'm not *too* concerned about that, but some people are quite sensitive to their machines randomly "phoning home", especially when "home" isn't anywhere predictable or official.

1) Might it be better to replace these with (visibly) Fedora/Redhat hosted services?

2) Perhaps the preferences dialog should wait and ask for permission before doing this test. A "Check Connectivity" button would work. It should of course say *where* it will attempt to connect to before you click.

3) In general, how can you predict/enumerate/limit the external hosts a box will automatically connect to, before a user has even attempted to do anything that would plausibly trigger one?

Obviously if I browse to www.google.com I expect a connection to go there.

I sort of expect PackageKit connections to the repo, but can disable those. (It would have been nice to have been asked to enable automatic scans for updates first though.)

Similarly for things like Firefox Addons updates, Adobe Reader/Java updates, CDDB lookups from media players.

This one's a bit weirder though. Why would I have expected it to go *there*?

I think there ought to be a Policy(TM) on this!

Comment 1 John Sullivan 2011-06-08 16:05:43 UTC
(Just in case you think this is completely trivial: a random webservice with no obvious connection to Fedora or Gnome is getting told about every single publicly accessible passwordless VNC server in the world, with the endpoint address transmitted IN THE CLEAR.)

Comment 2 Fedora End Of Life 2012-08-16 15:45:36 UTC
This message is a notice that Fedora 14 is now at end of life. Fedora 
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 14. It is 
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no 
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of '14' have been closed as WONTFIX.

(Please note: Our normal process is to give advanced warning of this 
occurring, but we forgot to do that. A thousand apologies.)

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