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

It's about time

[unixcrab]

It seems like any kind of Linux usage statistics you see these days are just a load of hot air. Hopefully this will provide some solid data and hopefully Canonical will make it public. I for one will happily enable it.

Re:It's about time

[quantumphaze]

They should send the usage statistics to the mailing addresses of all the big name game developers so we can finally get rid of Windows.

Also send them to hardware companies that seemingly sabotage any attempt to write Linux drivers.

Test Your Bias!

[gravos]

Test your Free Software bias! If this article had the following summary, would you react differently?

"Just released as part of the latest patch Tuesday for Windows 7 (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Windows Server, too) is a new feature called microsoft-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this feature provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Windows installations by sending an 'I am alive' ping to Microsoft on a daily basis. When the microsoft-census update is installed, the program is to be added to the daily scheduled tasks to be executed so that each day it will report to Microsoft over HTTP the number of times this system previously sent to Microsoft (this counter is stored locally and with it running on a daily basis it's thereby indicating how many days the Windows 7 installation has been active), the Microsoft distributor channel, the product name as acquired by the system's DMI information, and which Windows release is being used. That's all that microsoft-census does, at least for now. Previously there haven't been such Windows tracking measures attempted by Microsoft."

why not if its optional

[blackest_k]

I'll let it run at least initially, I am curious as to how many people run ubuntu and where (to at least the country level). If ordinary users can access that information I will be happy enough to run it on my systems.

If that access isn't available then I won't.

 

I'm torn

[mpeskett]

Is this a good thing for creating verifiable stats on the number of users, or a bad thing because of the "phone home" behaviour.

At least it's not doing this secretly...

Re:Phone home?

[FudRucker]

the slashdot submission summary says it is a cronjob, it would be easy to look in /etc/cron.* and remove the entries for it, check Top for any running dameons for it, and remove the binary from /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin (where they installed it) or apt-get remove "package_name" could do it all for you automagically