Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

“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.

“The canonical-census v0.1 description is simply
“canonical-census – send “I am alive” ping to Canonical.” When
looking at the Debian package source to this Python program, “Send
an “I am alive” ping to Canonical. This is used for surveying how
many original OEM installs are still existing on real
machines.”

Complete
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