Prevent gweather from disclosing customized location

When one adds a custom location in the GNOME Clock applet, and "Set"’s it, a request for weather information is made to weather.noaa.gov, that presumably discloses the custom location chosen by the user.

Setting the /apps/gweather/prefs/auto_update GConf key to false does not help.

A workaround that was suggested to us is to add weather.noaa.gov to the "Ignore Host" list in the GNOME Network Proxy preferences: without a proxy configured, these requests cannot go out. At first glance, it looks a bit hackish, and it would be nicer to disable this feature in a way that works even if the hostname in use changes some day, but in last resort, we might end up doing that.

We should research a (probably GConf -based) way to disable that feature.

Next thing to do:

• If we stop using the GNOME clock applet (#6284), verify this fixes this issue, and be done with it.
• test the /schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/show_weather and /schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/show_temperature GConf options.

Note that the connection is apparently done by gnome-panel, through the configured HTTP proxy (Polipo). It ignores SOCKS proxy settings.

Attachments

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Related issues

• Related to #6284
• Related to #7949 (closed)

Original created by @tails on 5306 (Redmine)