[clug] everyone still calling home?

[James Polley]

calls to musicbrainz and freedb aren't calling home; both of those services
are CD database services, the player was trying to figure out what CD you
had inserted and load track names for it.
I'm not surprised this persisted even when all plugins were removed -most
people consider this required behaviour for a cd player now. I *am*
surprised you weren't able to turn it off, but I don't know enough about the
particular apps  to know what to do to turn it off - I've not played an
audio CD in years :)

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal at eyal.emu.id.au>wrote:

> I usually use an old CD player attached to my sound system, but today
> decided
> to try and use my system (f9) to see what it does.
>
> On inserting the CD a dialogue pops up offering three programs for handling
> the CD. I first selected the default "Rhythmbox music player". I noticed
> that
> it went right away and connected to
>        stimpy.musicbrainz.org:www
> it kept doing so even after I deselcted all plugins and any other options I
> considered related.
>
> Next I selected the offered VLC. This one makes a connection to
>        mirror.freedb.org:8880
> again, I did not request it and I unticked anything I deemed related.
>
> The third offer was an extractor which I had no interest in.
>
> I finally used what I know, mplayer, which just played it nicely with:
>        mplayer cdda:// -cache 5000
>
> Nevertheless, trying to use gnome-mplayer, it went ahead and  contacted
>        mirror.freedb.org:www
> adding '--disable_cover_art_fetch' did not help either.
>
> Is it now standard for all (yes, I am generalizing here) programs to call
> home
> (regardless of what excuse is given for it)? Should I keep blocking
> connections
> on my firewall or is there a simple way to say "please do not access the
> internet unless I say so"? Some kind of privacy setting somewhere?
>
> So far, kmplayer is the only program I tried that did not make a
> connection.
>
> --
> Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au)
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