[mythtv-users] What are these connections?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 9 Nov 2017 07:10:53 -0500, you wrote:

>Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote on Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 02:44:03AM +1300:
>> If you are really set on preventing it from connecting to the themes
>> server, then the simple way to prevent it is to put a rule in your
>> router's firewall to block that connection.  But it is really not
>> something to worry about - all it is getting is the list of themes and
>> their descriptions.  It does not send any information to the server,
>> it just gets the current theme data.  You have to actually select a
>> theme in the Theme Chooser menu before it will download a theme.
>
>Although I myself am not particularly worried about the consequences of MythTV
>phoning home, I don't think one should be so quick to dismiss the privacy
>concerns. You are in fact sending information to the server (your IP address and
>access time at a minimum), and I think any such activity should be opt-in.

Yes, it probably should have an option to control it.  But it is just
doing the same thing as Ubuntu when it does a daily check of the
package lists to see if there is anything to be updated.  I do not
know of anyone who turns that off.

>Couldn't MythTV wait to refresh its theme data until you enter the Theme
>Chooser screen and explicitly ask it to refresh?

I am sure it could - but then people would complain about the delay.
And the themes would be out of date compared to the other packages,
which would cause problems that people would wind up complaining about
when they failed to do an update before trying to install a theme.  We
really want the devs to be spending their time on more important
things.