On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 09:33:51PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
I wonder if it is worth introducing an entirely new tracking concept
here if you actually don't want to track but just count. The NTP
approach has the benefit that you introduce no new tracking concept at
all, but you just use the data that is pretty much generated
anyway. It also makes this all feel less one-sided, after all you
provide them with a deal: fedora gives the user correct time, the user
is therefore counted.
Well, I guess one way of looking at it is that this is part of Fedora's bug
and security update service.
I guess the question is if hosting an NTP server is more or less
work
than hosting a uuid counting server, and whether the privacy issues
the uuid solution brings are worth it.
The infrastructure team assures me that it would be considerably more work.
BTW, iirc intel used to count installations through the http ping
check in their captive portal detection. Fedora runs a similar service
which is used by NM, no? maybe that's a nicer solution too: add a http
header field to the ping check that each client sets to "1" on one of
these ping checks a day, and "0" all other times. Then you count how
We have this too and it's useful for some subset of desktop installs, but
doesn't tell us about server, cloud, or container usage.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader