tumblerd making remote requests to generate thumbnails

[Leonardo Müller]

It was noticed that tumblerd makes network requests when creating thumbnails to m3u8 files if they reference remote files. It requires no interaction from the user beyond having the file, so it can even be copied from an offline storage and, when there is network available, it starts downloading. It seems to download two ts segments, the first from the list and another at 1/3 of the list.

It does that regardless of the origin of the segments, so one segment can be from one website, while other segment can be from another site.

If the first segment is invalid for some reason, tumblerd retries to download it over and over. Considering that m3u8 is used for videos, this can cause some pretty big downloads from just having a file.

Maybe this could be used even as some sort of fingerprinting, like the 1x1 gif on websites and emails?

Thunar has a setting to generate no thumbnails, to generate only from local storage and from remote storage. Maybe tumblerd should have a setting like this too (if this setting already exists, I'm sorry, but I have not found it).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: tumbler 4.16.0-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.2.0-37.38~22.04.1-generic 6.2.16
Uname: Linux 6.2.0-37-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.5
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Sat Dec 2 22:12:50 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-06-13 (2363 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Release amd64 (20170412)
SourcePackage: tumbler
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to jammy on 2019-12-22 (1441 days ago)
modified.conffile..etc.cron.daily.apport: [deleted]