The developers of the Fedora distribution announced their decision to integrate a component for sending statistics to the project's server in the editions of Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT, and Fedora CoreOS, which will allow gauging the number of users who have the distribution installed. Previously, such statistics were sent in traditional Fedora builds, and now it will also be included in atomically updated editions based on rpm-ostree.
By default, data transmission will be enabled in Fedora 34 IoT and Silverblue, while Fedora CoreOS will receive it in August. Users who prefer not to send data about their system are offered to disable the service rpm-ostree-countme.timer with the command 'systemctl mask --now rpm-ostree-countme.timer'. It is noted that only anonymized data is sent, which does not include information that could be used to identify specific users. The counting mechanism used is similar to that employed in Fedora 32's Count Me service, based on the transmission of an installation time counter and a variable containing information about the architecture and OS version.
The transmitted counter value increases every week. This method allows assessing how long the used release has been installed, which is sufficient for analyzing the dynamics of user transitions to new versions and identifying short-lived installations in continuous integration systems, testing environments, containers, and. virtual machinesThe variable containing information about the OS edition (VARIANT_ID from /etc/os-release) and system architecture allows differentiating between editions, branches, and spins.
Source: opennet.ru
