Several people have written to me about the federal government’s online census system, which is open only to Windows and Mac users. Russell provides a good analysis of the security issues raised by the approach.
The Census and Open Source
May 7, 2006
Share this post
One Comment

Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed
Blocked Twice: How Bill C-34’s Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Compound the Online News Act’s Harm to Young Canadians’ News Access
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court’s Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

They’ve changed their minds
See http://www22.statcan.ca/ccr02/ccr02_003_e.htm
The restriction has been lifted for linux users. The remaining requirements are the same as for Windows/Mac, i.e. specific browser and Java versions. The text switches back and forth between “open source” and “linux”, so I don’t know if this applies to *BSD as well.