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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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That's enough. I'm calling it evil from now on.
Thought it's probably fine after reading the title, but this shit isn't fine. What the fuck.
we seriously need to get the reporting domain added to popular blocklists
What?
the program uploads the information to somewhere, right? just like the telemetry functions in windows. adding the domain they use to popular blocklists would help those who use pihole or something similar to that.
Oh I thought you had something against the OP or their source and wanted their domain blocked.
The MAC address is anonymized with sha256, and IP adresses aren't stored.
So this seems to me to be perfectly anonymous.
MAC addresses are 48 bit, and half of that is just the manufacturer. So 24 bits really, and those bits aren't random, I think manufacturers just assign these based on some scheme, like a serial number. Point is you could easily reverse the SHA by brute force.
You can't calculate any useful statistic from a hash so literally the only use this would have is some sort of tracking.
Edit: I just looked up some data and I found someone using hashcat on an RTX 3090, which looks like it can do almost 10000 million SHA256 hashes per second of salted passwords (which are longer than 48 bit MACs, so MACs should be faster). 2²⁴ is 16.8 million, so it'll take about 1.7 ms per vendor. I found a database with (all?) 53011 vendor ids:
Yup, 89 seconds. You can calculate the SHA256 of every single MAC ever potentially issued in 89 seconds on a bog-standard 3090.
It's right at the top of the announcement, that it's mainly for more accurate stats on unique users.
It's not that I think this is a good idea, because I don't, but some people are blowing it out of proportions. Especially since this isn't at all decided. Which I seriously doubt it will.
You don't need this to count unique users. You could just assign a random number on install or whatever. Or even more simply, just run the thing once per month, should be accurate enough. Do they expect the software to just randomly spam duplicate reports? Don't write it that way.
Best case they don't care about collecting minimal data and don't understand that hashed MACs are easily reversible. So incompetent fools with no sensitivity to privacy.
Maybe this should be Manjaro's tagline: Not purposely malicious, just grossly negligent and ignorant.
Funny, I thought the exact same thing.
Why collect such data though? And you can call some Big Tech telemetry completely anonymous too if you trust their explanations.
You can see the code of what is send.
I'm not aware that Google claims they collect data anonymously, on everything where you are logged in.
So that's a false equivalence.
I meant other companies but ok.