What's generating this weird message?

The problem is intermittent but every now and then if I try to go to a website i'll sometimes see a blank webpage with the words in the top left corner: "I Am Alive!!!" Am I being contacted by some abducted space aliens, lol?

Anyway it will happen at random while using Opera, Firefox or Chrome. The only thing I could think of was I set the internal Firewall to "Deny" but after awhile it clears up and I can access the website. This has happened to me on several legit sites including BBC, CNN, NBR and a few others I forget.

By the way the built in Firewall looks strong. If I set that sucker to deny outbound traffic, it will block you from seeing the outside world. Also I re-downloaded Mint 10 torrent and with the FW set to deny inbound traffic the torrent tracker doesn't see you. Is the built in Linux Firewall really that good?

Ok so I don't really no what's causing this message so it's kind of weird right now.

 

It's Canonicals answer to Microsofts market share blah blah:
[Phoronix] Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/canonical-census/0.1

 

Hey thanks for the link. I had no idea it was Canonical doing this, lol. I'll leave it alone for about a week. If it continues to annoy me i'll remove the canonical census.

 

OK now that I know why this is frustrating. I'm going to websites that I go to on a regular basis and i'm locked out until the OS allows me to access it again. I even removed it sudo apt-get remove canonical-census and it still does it.

Crap MS took it's lumps over the phone home fiasco, at least they didn't block you from going to your websites.

 

This is odd, did you buy a computer with Ubuntu pre installed? If not, canonical-census won't be there.

 

I installed it on my Dell Vostro 1500. I even removed the census crap via the terminal. It asked for the password and said it removed it. I did it again and said it was already removed so it appears it in fact was installed with Mint 10 RC.

I don't mind being part of Canonicals census but crap don't redirect me to one of your counters and confirm I have your OS installed.

 

How did you get the package? It should only be preinstalled on systems sold with Ubuntu, and it's not in the official repositories, so you can't install it accidetally. Do you have any PPAs in your sources.list?

 

Linux Mint 10 "Julia" - RC (32-bit) - Linux Mint

How do I check for PPA's in the sources.list, noob here?

 

Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and check if there are any links containing the string "ppa".

I'm not sure about the content of the Mint repository.
Can you please run this command:

Code:

sudo apt-cache search canonical-census

 

I typed in the terminal command and I got back the following:

canonical-census - send "I am alive" ping to Canonical.

 

I checked the sources.list and checked three tabs : LinuxMint Software/Other Software/Authentication and see anything PPA related.

 

I prefer the following command to see where a package has came from or could come from on the next update/upgrade (I don't know if it can give misleading answers if you change your sources.list(s) afterwards?):

sudo apt-cache policy canonical-census

 

canonical-census:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 0.1
Version table:
0.1 0
500 Index of /ubuntu maverick/partner i386 Packages

 

This sounds like a DNS redirect. I'm not really sure why the census would be doing this, did you just search for "I am alive" and it came up?

Have you tried using a proxy server, or changing to OpenDNS, or using a different internet connection?

 

The 500 line looked odd until I realized that the forum software had interpreted the url on that line

Code:

http : //archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/

.

As far as the apt package system is concerned it isn't installed anymore, but the partner part of repository name does looks curious, and I think it was already mentioned that it was only meant to be on pre-installed Ubuntu systems?? (I'm not that familiar with Ubuntu).

If it is still causing problems even though the package is uninstalled, then you would need to become a detective by checking the contents of package, list all the files, check if any of those files were still present on your system and check the pre and post install and remove scripts to see if what they did.

 

Too advanced for a noob like me. I'll just wait for Mint stable and try again.

 

Update: I noticed I had DMZ Hosting enabled because on occasion I play on Xbox Live. Could this be causing this problem?

I just turned it off so i'll keep an eye on it.