As I'm screwing with a device trying to get wifi working, it occurs to me: Why are we still dutifully setting MAC addresses from flash rather than letting the ethernet card take a random one?
MAC addresses are the fucking Digital ID that everyone keeps railing against, the thing is written in the factory, it's logged in the DB, so it's connected to your identity when you buy the device, then it's being emitted out on any LAN you connect to.
MAC addresses are the fucking Digital ID that everyone keeps railing against, the thing is written in the factory, it's logged in the DB, so it's connected to your identity when you buy the device, then it's being emitted out on any LAN you connect to.
@cjd you can configure that in linux
Right but I'm coding for OpenWRT and in that case, you kind of just get whatever you compile for...
@cjd so you're limited by what the hardware can do?
Not at all, if you make it put a random mac, it'll do it, it's just that (AFAIK) there's no way to really configure this after you've installed OpenWRT (OpenWRT limitation) so once you put the code in there to pull the MAC off flash and use it, that's what it's going to be...
I mean why do we even bother with these static MACs? Shouldn't we make like an RFC or something that MACs should always be dynamic and the static MAC should be zeroed out?
I mean why do we even bother with these static MACs? Shouldn't we make like an RFC or something that MACs should always be dynamic and the static MAC should be zeroed out?
@cjd i thought you could tell the kernel somehow? i know networkd can do it, could be a nice weekend project
Of course, it's just that default behavior is what 99% of people are going to do, so therefore we still have MAC-Address-as-Digital-ID
@cjd on the other hand if mac addresses are known not to be reliable we're gonna have digital id apps forced upon us, so in that regard i'm fine with it being an "if you know you know" type beat
They're never gonna *force* digital ID on absolutely everyone, because it's not worth it to turn 0.01% into terrorists over it. They'll just make it inconvenient to not use one.
