 One of the Linux distributions that I was most critical of when I first took a look at it on video was Linux FX. Linux FX is a Windows 11 clone. It's basically a Windows 11 clone as Linux. And when I took a look at it, having never used it, you know, my very first time taking a look at it was just a couple of months ago on video, I thought it was actually going to be proper GNU slash Linux just dressed up a little bit to look like Windows. No, no, no, it's not actually Linux. I mean, it's Linux, but it's not the Linux that we all know and love as far as free and open source software. It's all proprietary software. And I didn't realize that until I actually opened Linux FX for the first time and realized, you know, it had nothing but proprietary software on it practically. So we're talking about Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge teams, a Skype, Microsoft Office and OneDrive and all of that proprietary crap, most of it Microsoft software installed out of the box, which I guess is OK. But here's the thing, all of the Linux FX tools, you know, the custom tools they built for the distribution itself, they license it all as proprietary closed source software. So this Linux distribution is actually proprietary software. Not only that, they require you to buy a license to activate a license. It looks exactly like Windows 11. You know, it's got the same Windows 11 wallpaper and all that. And then you get you need to register your version of Linux FX, your copy of Linux FX, you know, very similar to how you activate a copy of Windows. And it's just scary. I was very negative, very harsh when I took a look at Linux FX, because it had been getting a lot of press. People have been talking highly about this Linux distribution because it's going to bring Windows users over to Linux by, you know, exposing them to Linux because it's so similar to Linux. And I was like, no, this is absolutely not the right way to introduce people to Linux, because the point of Linux is not just to look and feel like Windows, the point of Linux and why people should want to use Linux is for freedom. You know, when we talk about free as in freedom, that's what we want. We want free and open source software, not only free and open source software in regards of the freedom to do what you want, but also free and open source software is typically better for privacy and security because being open source, more eyes on the code, it's just going to be a lot more secure in the long run. So I actually thought this Linux distribution was very scary. I thought this was a bad sign of things to come. I was really hoping this Linux distribution wouldn't become popular and that people didn't get tricked into the scam that is Linux FX because I just I'm not going to say like it's a complete scam or whatever. But it looks like a quick money grab by some people. You know, they created a few custom applications. They threw up the Windows 11 wallpaper and tried to theme it exactly like Windows 11, which I'm assuming Microsoft could sue them for some of the images and the fonts and everything that they're using in this distribution. I can't imagine that's legal. I would not recommend anyone to install this. The only reason I'm bringing it back up today on video is because I was made aware of this post yesterday over on a website I never been to before. Colonel E.U. And that's Colonel K.E.R. in A.L.E.U. And the title of it is dumping Linux FX customers, a Windows like distro, including the spyware and activation. And the title is pretty accurate, obviously. It's very Windows like it has some telemetry built into it. And obviously you have to register, right? So they want to know everything about you. And yes, it's always phoning home. So it is kind of spyware, very similar to Windows, though, right? But the part here, dumping Linux FX customers is that when you register for a copy of Linux FX, you know, obviously it saves that to a database on the Linux FX servers. And apparently that can be compromised really easily. And again, I didn't want this distribution to be popular because when I took a look at it, I immediately I could spot it for really what it is. It seems like a scam, right? It seems shady as hell. But apparently Linux FX, according to this article here, claims over one million users worldwide. That is a huge number of for a Linux distribution, right? One million users worldwide. They had over 15,000 downloads this week. So, you know, it's it's unfortunately being used by a lot of people around the world, probably that think that it's, you know, a Linux distribution that's most compatible with Windows software, therefore they gravitate to it where many people don't realize, especially Windows users, is that, you know, all of this software that they're using, all the Microsoft or proprietary software like Teams and Skype, Microsoft Office, Office 365 and things like that one drive, you know, just because it works on Linux FX, it also works on every other Linux distribution, including the ones that are actually free and open source software. So you don't need Linux FX to run this stuff. But Linux FX has tricked a lot of people into using it. Unfortunately, I'm going to zoom in a little bit here so you guys can see the article here because I am going to point out some text here that is important. So I'm not going to read the article entirely, but just know when you download the ISO of Linux FX inside the root file system, there is file system dot squash FS. And inside that file system, there is a executable at user bin Windows FX dash register. So there's a executable binary on the system of program. That program is the Windows FX register program, meaning, hey, you need to register your copy of Windows FX. And when you execute this binary, the Windows FX register binary, it executes user bin ENV, which is typically user bin ENV bash. If you're specifying a bash script or user bin ENV fish, if you're, you know, specifying a fish script. So there's some kind of script here itself. It's GBR three, which I'm not familiar with at all. I don't even know what language that is, but it's a scripting language. And of course, it executes that script. Apparently GBR three is the executable name for the run time of Gombas. I don't know what the hell Gombas is. So I'm taking a look at the site here and it's a free development environment and full powerful development platform based on a basic interpreter with object extensions as easy as visual basic. Why in the hell are these people? I got all the things that you would possibly want to script things in on a Linux system. Why are you using this? You know, it's a visual basic ripoff. That's what the author says. Gombas is a visual basic room. But why would you even use visual basic at all? That's just, that's a strange choice. Everything about this Linux distribution just makes me scratch my head. So we have this Windows FX register program written in Gombas. And then the author says running strings on the file. We get, I guess, some of the source code here. And here is where things get scary here because one of the components here is GB dot DB dot MySQL. So it's going to connect to a MySQL database. What, which makes sense. I mean, if they're asking for you to register your copy of Linux FX, obviously they're saving it to a database somewhere on their servers, probably right. And here is the host, you know, the IP address of that server here is the user for that server. Linux 896 underscore keys. They actually give you a lot of information here in just this one file port. There is the port, I guess, for the server and the author. He also pointed out that, you know, the part about MySQL, the host name, the username was all there. And that was a little concerning to him. So he downloaded a tool. He used sudo apt to get install BPF trace. I don't know BPF trace. I'm assuming it's some kind of networking program may be used for penetration testing. I'm again, it's not something I'm familiar with, but he installed this program. And then when he did a sudo BPF trace dash E and then this string of text here, where it looks like he is going to try to connect to that MySQL database. And he gives a bunch of arguments here. These arguments I'm assuming are going to be in the next string here, host name, username, password. Database, for the user name, I guess, and then the port. So how did he get the password? Well, he says after opening the Linux FX activation client and typing a random key to get into it, he got the following information. So he actually got this information by trying to register Linux FX and then just typing in a random string of characters. And then it actually gave him all of the proper information, I guess, including the proper password to actually connect to the database. And then the next title here, wrecked, he says, this gives us all the information we need to dump the database. Now, all he needs to do is run MySQL dump and then give it, of course, IP address, the username, the port number and the password. And then you can see the redirect to wrecked dot sequel, which is just a file he named. He could have named it anything, but he's just taking the information on that database on the Linux FX database right on their servers and he's downloading it and to his own SQL file locally. And then he opens that. And you know what it contains? It consists of everybody's license key, everybody's email address, as well as information about expiration dates when your license key expires, I guess, the quantity of the machines that you license when you registered for Linux FX. But the real problem is, you know, you don't want people to have sensitive information. So if it includes your real name, your email address and your IP, that's not good, right? That is completely unacceptable. Now, unfortunately, things like this get compromised all the time. Many companies, even free and open source companies, sometimes are not responsible with the way they collect user information. And then it's available for anyone to hack into essentially, although this wasn't much of a hack. They were really lax a day's ago and how they were predicting their user's information here for Linux FX. Now, I don't mean to be one of those people to tell you I told you so, but when I took a look at this thing, I mean, I immediately I spotted this thing for what it is. It didn't smell right. You just take a look at it as like, it's got a it's got a bad smell to it. It really was off-putting to me just the fact that it was nothing but proprietary software. And apparently it's all written in visual basic and just everything about this Linux distribution. There was nothing Linux like about this. Again, it seemed to be more like a and I don't want to keep using this word, but it seemed like a scam. It was there to attract people mainly to make money and also maybe to data mine them to collect names and email addresses and IP number or whatever they were trying to mine people's data here. And you guys hear me talk about the benefits of free and open source software or proprietary software all the time, right? Free and open source software. The number one reason to use it over proprietary software is of course freedom. And that's what I heavily, you know, I pound that drum, right? It was all about freedom. But there's other big reasons why free and open source software is simply better than proprietary software. One of the biggest reasons is privacy, right? Proprietary software companies do not respect your privacy. In many cases, proprietary software is designed to mine data from you oftentimes behind your back secretly. That's why it's closed source software. That's why you can't view the source code. It's all these binaries and the code is obfuscated where you can't even investigate the code, audit the code, read the code, right? And this because if you could read the code for something like Windows 11, for example, you would see it does a lot of really nasty and unethical things to you behind your back. So don't use proprietary software. Don't use proprietary operating systems at all, including proprietary Linux operating systems like Linux FX. I know a lot of you guys have tried it out. Many of you guys have registered, unfortunately with this company. There's really nothing you can do about that. Now, one thing I would say if you know somebody that's also running Linux FX and let them know about this particular security situation that way hopefully they can make smarter choices in the future. Now I do want to say that I haven't verified this myself. I actually have not went through these steps and actually tried to see if I could get the Linux FX database myself, mainly because I don't want to download Linux FX and install it. I wouldn't want to register for anything. I really don't want anything to do with this particular Linux distribution, even just for the sake of video. But this article here was published on 5, 23 May 23rd. That was yesterday. So he just published this yesterday. I don't know if he's actually let the Linux FX team know about this situation. If he has, maybe they've already done something about this to where they've closed this whole. But it does make me a little sad and very angry, actually, that a company that claims over one million users worldwide, they're so lazy on how they predict the data of their users. Right. They just put it out there freely for anybody to get. And I know in the free and open source communities a lot of times we hate corporate distros, distros like a boom to and fedora and open Sousa because, you know, you've got companies, large corporations, canonical Red Hat Sousa behind those distributions. And corporations are evil, right? We prefer community oriented projects here in the Linux community, typically. But there is something to be said about corporate back distributions, having a large billion dollar company behind something because they're going to take privacy and security much more seriously than smaller organizations sometimes. And I think in this case, you could see this with this Linux FX distributions because they didn't even seem like they were really Linux users. They I don't even know if they really know what Linux is. It seemed like some Windows users got together and were trying to do this money making scam. Right. We're going to try to bait some people. Right. We're going to put this Linux distribution out there. All we're going to do is we're just going to rip off a bunch of artwork and fonts and stuff from Microsoft. We're going to put it in a Linux distribution and hope we catch a few flies with it. And unfortunately, it has worked for them. But like they say, you know, every cloud has a silver lining. I do think there is a silver lining to this story. I think by Linux FX being so shady and having the problems that they're having, I think the community will be more resistant to such a bait next time. Right. We're not going to fall for this a second time. At least I hope not. Now, before I go, I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Devon Dustin Gabe James, Max and Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott West, why you bald homie? Alan Armored. I heard you bald homie. Come on. Where do you guys come up with these names? Chuck, Mandarin, Rhine, Diokai, Dylan, George Lee, Linux, Ninja, Marstram, Mike or Yon. I can't stop laughing at why you bald homie. Alexander, Peace, Arjun, Vador, Polydead, Realiteens for Lust, Red Rabbit, Steven, Willie. These guys are my highest tiered patrons without these guys. This episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen and all these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace. A proprietary Linux distribution, what could go wrong?