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Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

Posted by Soulskill on from the following-bitprints-and-scrapes-on-the-router dept.

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."

3 of 548 comments (clear)

  1. zzzz by hubdawg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    i am alive i am bored

  2. fr1st prost by socheres · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    fp!

  3. Re:Can't find it by Arancaytar · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Addendum: As other comments have pointed out, TFA very explicitly states this only covers OEM installations, which TFS omits. The non-OEM software channel does not have this package.