Motd Is Advertising HBO's Silicon Valley

I kinda like it - it's an innovative approach to marketing and helps sponsor the Ubuntu effort.

It's not that intrusive and you don't have to click it.. my only request would be not to hide it behind the short link but that would make metric collection harder.

From what i have read from the bug report it fetches this asynchronously via a systemd unit. This is not so bad, originally it did it synchronously on login and would fail after 2 seconds if it couldn't fetch the url. Thats bad! My problem with it is that it is a slippery slope indeed!