[CentOS] what writes to /root/.cache/mesa ?

Thu Feb 21 15:49:12 UTC 2019
Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>


On 2/21/19 9:30 AM, Jonathan Billings wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 08:22:39AM -0600, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
>> PS This gives me dejavu. A while ago when people started demanding to have
>> google chrome browser installed on their workstations I had hard time to get
>> rid of google's cron jobs that were writing where only root should - without
>> explicit permission to do so. Dough. Somebody's software thinks it is
>> smarter than everyone who uses it... "Machine learning" all the way ;-)
> 
> Since I work at a university that uses Google Apps, we're asked to
> provide Google Chrome for all our users, but since the package is not
> very enterprise ready, I have to make several adjustments.
> 
> One thing I do is put an 'exit 0' in /etc/default/google-chrome.  This
> effectively stops most of the evil that the RPM does in its
> postscripts.  (As a reminder, this is what the latest RPM does,
> https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/MS~7Fkr5AWYo7SAWAl8t6A )
> 
> I also manage private repos (with pulp) of the Google Chrome repos, in
> case I need to go back to a previous version, so having it overwrite
> my repositories is actually damaging.
> 
> I also disable 'at' and the atd service on our workstations, and this
> RPM turns atd back on and schedules an at job to run the
> /etc/cron.daily/google-chrome script.
> 
> It's an absurd RPM and Google should be ashamed of it.
> 

Thanks for your input, very instructive!

Google is not ashamed of what it is doing. As one clever man said over 
decade ago: you don't need to recruit spies anymore, just roll out 
"free" services. And we all know, these "intelligence" agencies were 
never ashamed of whatever they have done.

But as another clever man said: the people do deserve the government 
they have.

Valeri

-- 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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