Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[Antony Mawer]

On 3/08/2006 2:25 PM, User Freebsd wrote:
>> b. Duplicates.
> 
> Ted seems to have this covered with the CPU ID thing ...

Isn't this one of those things that BIOS vendors added a "Disable" flag 
to their BIOS setup's for in order to prevent the wide-spread privacy 
concerns that cropped up when it was first released? I'm fairly sure 
this is disabled on most of the systems I've built...

The token-based system mentioned by Mikhail Goriachev sounded 
interesting, although I haven't done any further thinking past what was 
originally mentioned...

>> c. Fakery.
> 
> IMHO, not a *really* big issue ... I could see someone bothering to do 
> it once or twice, but seems to be "alot of work for little gain" ...

Agreed...

I could probably add around 1,500 systems that could conceivably be 
setup to chime in with their numbers periodically; one of the 
pre-requisites for that would be that the access method be HTTP or HTTPS 
based so it could be relayed via a proxy...

Another nice thing to include might be a hash of hardware inventory (a 
further opt-in thing beyond the basic checkins)... Mark alluded to this 
early in the piece, but it would be nice to be able to pull up something 
that said "hang on, out of the X% of users on file, Y% are using Adaptec 
SCSI cards, in particular model XYZ"... this would be very helpful when 
trying to get vendor support etc...

Some form of hash calculated on these would allow you to detect if they 
had changed at all, and only re-send them in the event of a change...

... just thinking out loud ... !


-Antony