Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

suraj.sun passes along this excerpt from Phoronix: "Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an 'I am alive' ping to Canonical on a daily basis. When the canonical-census package is installed, the program is to be added to the daily Cron jobs to be executed so that each day it will report to Canonical over HTTP the number of times this system previously sent to Canonical (this counter is stored locally and with it running on a daily basis it's thereby indicating how many days the Ubuntu installation has been active), the Ubuntu distributor channel, the product name as acquired by the system's DMI information, and which Ubuntu release is being used. That's all that canonical-census does, at least for now. Previously there haven't been such Ubuntu tracking measures attempted by Canonical."

Comments

Double standard

[Bizzeh]

Canonical do this and it seem to be fine, but if microsoft where to do this, they would be back up infront of the EU being fined hundreds of millions again and it would be the worlds biggest uproar. Gotta love a world of double standards

Microsoft...

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine this will generate less outrage than if Microsoft ever tried to do it. Open Source is better than all commercial software!!!

OMG!

[Hognoxious]

Ubuntu has a rootkit! Run, run to the hills!

Re:Phone home?

[FudRucker]

i agree, thats why i would use Slackware as a first choice in the Linux department, if i needed a Debianish distro i would just use Debian, (ubuntu is a disobedient bastardized child of Debian and is in need of a good spanking or a timeout in the corner)