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by heikkilevanto1 days ago |
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upvoteby xeyownt1 days ago|
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Whatever you do there will always be uniquely identifiable information (if not an id, a fingerprint) on your machine.

If you want to escape that, you have to use dedicated privacy-enhancing tools / browsers, but even then, it's very likely that you can still be identified by motivated adversaries.

It doesn't mean you have to give up, but, if such id is necessary for technical reasons in systemd (I guess it is), I wouldn't worry too much.

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upvoteby Eddy_Viscosity21 days ago|
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> motivated adversaries.

This sounds like you're referring to state actors and intelligence agencies, but really this applies to the entire advertising/surveillance industry of people trying to sell you a new flavor of soda.

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upvoteby xeyownt1 days ago|
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Sure, but the problem then is not systemd machineid, but rather the browser reading it and making it available for such identification (don't know if there is a browser out there doing that though).

Unless anonymization is provided by your browser, there is nothing you can do to prevent such identification technology run by these advertisers to build your profile, and send you targeted ads.

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upvoteby close041 days ago|
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> Unless anonymization is provided by your browser, there is nothing you can do to prevent such identification technology

The OS could treat certain apps as untrusted and spoof or limit the access to these unique identifiers.

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upvoteby ygjb1 days ago|
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That puts the OS in the position of attempting to profile or determine if an application is accessing OS, hardware, and user details to build a fingerprint, vs using those capabilities to do something the user intends, which puts the OS developer into a performance sucking, soul sucking arms race against big and little brother surveillance/advertising platforms. I absolutely support the intention, just know that it's a brutal battle :(
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upvoteby close041 days ago|
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The OS already does this for a living. A set of identifiers requested sporadically by an app can’t be what breaks its back. Isn’t iOS already doing something similar?
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upvoteby type01 days ago|
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And petty criminals that set up fake fake websites to steal your money, ad-networks are also commonly used to spread malware so limiting the number of attack surfaces is the only sane thing to do.
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upvoteby vel0city1 days ago|
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When you go really hard with the privacy-enhancing tools, you can potentially just make yourself even more visible. When you're so far outside the normal way a user looks you're making yourself even more unique than if you had normal-ish looking identifiers.

It can take a lot of effort to make yourself truly just blend in and disappear.

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upvoteby mmooss1 days ago|
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No security is perfect; there is always a way to bypass it. But security can be highly valuable.
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upvoteby gcr1 days ago|
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The supported method to get a new one each boot is to truncate the file to 0 bytes and disable systemd-machine-id-commit.service

Double-check that this method actually works though.

Machine ID is used for things like dhcp leases, log rotation, etc. IPV6 addresses or transient MAC addresses are derived from it

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upvoteby inigyou1 days ago|
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I thought the kernel generated SLAAC addresses based on MAC and privacy addresses based on random numbers.
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upvoteby tremon1 days ago|
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It does, but DHCPv6 prescribes a persistent device identifier (DUID): https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9915/#RFC3315-9

The DUID is designed to be unique across all DHCP clients and servers, and stable for any specific client or server. That is, the DUID used by a client or server SHOULD NOT change over time if at all possible; for example, a device's DUID should not change as a result of a change in the device's network hardware or changes to virtual interfaces

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upvoteby 90291 days ago|
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You can replace it with a generic one to hopefully blend in https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...
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upvoteby layla5alive1 days ago|
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dhcp uses it by default nowadays.. but you can tell dhcp to use your mac address instead (like it used to)..

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1498611/ubuntu-dhcp-client-u... (linked because depending on version, there are several different ways to make this change..)

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upvoteby TobTobXX23 hours ago|
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Only side effect I ran into is that journalctl couldn't find the logs of a previous boot.
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upvoteby floralhangnail1 days ago|
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I do it with an hourly cronjob and haven't noticed any ill effects.
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