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

OEM only

[ThoughtMonster]

The summary (conveniently?) left out the part where it says that this package is only included on OEM installations, not normal installs.

Ubuntu already had popularity-content in place

[Anonymous Coward]

The popularity-content package in Debian and Ubuntu already existed, and collected information on the amount of submitters and the packages installed.
See http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ for the summary of that collected information. So the claim that there has not been such tracking measures in place earlier is not quite true.

Why is this news?

[thue]

Debian has a similar usage tracking package: http://popcon.debian.org/ .

As long as such a package is only installed with the users consent, I don't see the problem.

The solution for NOT installing certain packages

[fuzzel]

To make sure that no other packages like eg base-files suddenly start adding these kind of packages you might want to add to /etc/apt/preferences or prolly better a file like /etc/apt/preferences.d/dontwant something like:

Package: avahi-daemon canonical-census
Pin: release v=dontwant,a=dontwant
Pin-Priority: 1001

This will block two annoying packages that don't belong on most servers.

avahi, because you don't need to announce everywhere when your server is located somewhere in a DC (indeed it might be handy in a local network, but it stops being useful when you don't have multicast routing and/or have a routed network)

canonical-census, because Ubuntu does not need to know what your server is doing.

Of course other packages can be blocked in a similar way from being auto-added by apt. (unfortunately a dpkg 'hold' does not work).

Another way is to make a fake empty package, then the depends are satisfied, in the above case you might have packages which refuse to install because the package can't be found. Do make sure with 'apt-cache policy' to see if you don't have other apt-prefs at a prio of 1001 (or higher if that is possible) otherwise they might still get there.

I am also wondering when Ubuntu/Redhat and other such commercial "Linux" companies start being nice to all the people who actually do the hard work and start acknowledging that those people are what they are selling/supporting/consulting on and earning money with.