 So, today I wanted to make a quick video updating you guys on the situation that's going on with Audacity. Audacity is one of the most important pieces of free and open source software on the planet. It has countless millions of users around the world. Audacity is a cross-platform audio editor, cross-platform, meaning it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and anybody that does any kind of work with multimedia, anybody that does any serious work with audio especially, has probably used Audacity at some point. Anybody of them probably use Audacity in their day-to-day workflow. I know I use Audacity all the time. Any time I have to do any kind of serious audio editing, I fire up Audacity. But now, Audacity is making some strange decisions here in the last couple of months. About two months ago, Audacity was purchased by a corporation, Muse Group, and as soon as Muse Group got involved, they started adding telemetry into the software. And the free and open source software communities, we don't like telemetry. We are very anti-telemetry. And we caused a big stink about it and then the Audacity team and Muse Group, they kind of backtracked a little bit, but they really didn't backtrack at all because this past week, they updated their privacy policy. Now the privacy policy for Audacity actually states that they're collecting your personal data and sending it over the internet to Audacity who then can share that information with government agencies and law enforcement agencies if they're asked. What personal information are they collecting? Whether they're collecting information about your operating system. Are you running Windows, Mac, Linux? I guess if you're running Linux, what distribution of Linux are you running? What's your hardware? What's the CPU in your computer? They're also collecting IP addresses. Now that is a major deal breaker for anybody that stands for the ideals of the free software movement or the open source movement. We like digital rights, digital privacy, and we do not like people collecting our IP addresses or our geolocation information. And then of course you're sending it over the internet to Audacity who then share it with whoever, they're sharing it with agencies in Europe, Russia, and the United States. Why is Audacity, which is an audio editor, why is it even connected to the internet? Why is it sending anything over the internet? It makes absolutely no sense. It's not a web browser, it's not some internet chat client or something that actually has to be connected to the internet. The fact that an audio editor is collecting this information and sending it over the internet is strange to me. But they're going beyond just getting your computer specs and your IP address and all of this. Later in the privacy policy they state that they don't want anybody under the age of 13 to use their software. You're prohibited from using Audacity if you are under the age of 13. You have to be 13 or older. Why is that the case? I don't know. I think it probably has to do with something to do with the data collecting they're doing. They can't do this maybe to children because it would get them in trouble in certain locations. I'm assuming that's the problem. So now, if you're under the age of 13, you're actually prohibited from using Audacity. At this point, I think it's safe to say that we can consider Audacity officially a piece of spyware and that, according to the free and open source communities, I think at this point we should just consider Audacity a dead project and move on. That may as well not even exist anymore, right? So what are your options? Those of you on Linux, you're good because chances are your Linux distribution hasn't updated to the latest version of Audacity that has the telemetry and the data tracking and all that in it. Chances are it's using a previous version of Audacity before all of that was introduced. Many Linux distributions are actually holding back from updating to that new version of Audacity. So right now you're probably good on most Linux distributions. But for some reason you had to run the latest version of Audacity with the data collecting and you wanted to turn that off somehow. What you could do is you could run Audacity inside FireGel. FireGel is a container program where you run a piece of software in this FireGel container and it kind of locks it down to where it can't do anything as far as it can affect the rest of your computer. It also, if you tell it, hey, you don't have access to the internet, you can shut it down that way. That's what you would do. You would run FireGel with the net flag, the dash net flag. You do FireGel dash net equals none and then Audacity and then Audacity runs inside FireGel and it no longer has access to the internet so it can't send any kind of data anywhere. Another thing you could do is just downgrade to an older version of Audacity if, you know, your distribution is shipping with a newer version. Downgrade to a previous version if that's possible. If you can find an app image of Audacity for one of the older versions before the telemetry was added, you could do that. But what most users are going to have to do is we're just going to have to wait until somebody forks Audacity and then we jump on the fork. And this happens all the time with free and open source software. I've seen it many times with big pieces of free and open source software, really, really popular pieces of free and open source software. I remember years ago when Sun Microsystems bought OpenOffice and, you know, took control of it and people didn't like the direction of OpenOffice, which had hundreds of millions of users around the world, hundreds of millions. And you know what? The community forked OpenOffice and created LibreOffice. And like literally the next day, everybody that was working on OpenOffice, everybody that was using OpenOffice just moved to LibreOffice. That's what's going to happen here. Everybody that's currently using Audacity, we're going to jump on the fork when the fork happens. What's going to happen is, you know, because Audacity is such a big project. It has so many contributors. You know, I imagine a very large group of those contributors to Audacity. They're going to fork it, rename it, and then everybody's going to start using the fork. All your Linux distributions, they're probably going to remove Audacity from their repositories and add the fork to the repositories. Those multimedia distributions of Linux that usually ship with Audacity would probably remove it and then, you know, add the fork. Because the great thing about free and open source software is that it never really dies because the code is free and open source. You know, anybody can take the code, modify it, redistribute it, you know, free and open source software can't die. As long as there's at least one person willing to maintain that piece of software, free and open source never dies. So really, I'm kind of making today's video really just to calm your fears. I know a lot of people I see it all over the internet. Hey, what are we going to do now that Audacity's been completely screwed up? Well, don't worry about it. I give it a month at the most and there will be a viable fork of Audacity and we'll just move on to that for now. Just use an older version if possible. If it's not possible, just put it in a fire jail container. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Epsy Gabe James, Mitchell, Paul, Wes, Allen, Akami, Chuck, Kurt, David, Dylan, Gregory, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fedora. I love the name. Paulie, Tech, Scott, Steven, and Willie. I hope I named everybody there. I really appreciate those guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without those guys. This episode you just watched wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. 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'd like to support my work, I'd appreciate it. Please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon.