As my father would have said "what in tarnation is this for?"

What is the purpose of this in other words? I have been looking into it and can see how it is configured and so forth but really can't come up with any real use for it that seems to make sense.

Just a bee in my bonnet caused by reading this stuff;
https://fosspost.org/analytics/privacy-security-concern-regarding-gnome-software

Which seems to be people getting their knickers in a knot just so that they walk funny.

Was a bit taken aback by that stuff. Don't think "firmware" upgrades are generally all that important at that level. And I was able, with a bit of struggle to actually do a bios upgrade on the Dell without Win installed on it. My Asus MB uefi is capable of being upgraded running only in the uefi system and I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that this is a fairly common feature for efi/uefi systems.

But it did get me to realize that this file exists and I would really like to know what it actually is for.

UEFI systems should all be upgradable independent of OS.

ranchhand wrote:

Which seems to be people getting their knickers in a knot just so that they walk funny.

Yes, does seem a bit that way, doesn't it?
It could perhaps be an indirect follow-on, like a "me-too, from the new privacy laws that will be coming in to force in Europe.

here in the Wikipedia

It's a good thing, I think. Things like default setting on Facebook has to become everything turned off until you allow it, instead of the "everything open" default setting they had initially.

As far as the file etc/machine-id goes, no idea. It occurs to me, though, that "what is it for" is obvious: machine-id. More interesting might be "who and what is accessing it".

Okay, reading through the article (haven't finished yet), I don't get the impression that fwupd is for motherboard bios style firmware updates but for things like say, USB bus firmware. Again, that's an impression. A guess.

GNOME Software & fwupd are installed by default on all modern major Linux distributions

This demonstrably untrue.

Still haven't finished but I'm not going to. The whole thing is what I call a ghost hunt. Looking for specters that simply aren't going to be there. Similar to a witch hunt but less with the hammer and "burn 'er, she's a witch!"

Yeah, that's about the impression I had, too. Someone being a bit too important for their own good, more or less.

I did wonder if the author might be German... :zipper_across_the_mouth:

warfacegod wrote:

GNOME Software & fwupd are installed by default on all modern major Linux distributions

This demonstrably untrue.

I couldn't find that fwupd is even a depends for anything in Mate which kind of surprised me.

I still want to know what that "machine-id" is actually used for.

I don't think I've ever heard of it and I spend a decidedly unhealthy amount of time in synaptic. To be fair, I've not used Gnome DE in years. I have used Cinnamon recently and some of my self builds use a fair amount of Gnome packages. I think it's fair to assume that, if it were important or common, I would have seen it. I would also have tried to remove it.

What is in the "machine-id" file? Is it readable?

I may even have one on the desktop (Ubuntu), but I can't be bothered turning it on at this time of night just to look for that.