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If a file on your computer is being used by a program to send information to someone, the answer isn't to destroy/randomize the file and break other applications, the answer is to not use the program that is sending your information somewhere.
Oh, chromium may break? Then I use an alternative. This is true for any other program.
Even better, it looks like there has been a file that always has the same value for a while; presumably they can just keep that in place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but how do you know what programs are misusing it?
This speaks to a more general need for user-friendly audit logs of which resources are accessed by which programs. I should be able to tell on any platform if Spotify called fopen on something in my documents folder.
can't you simply symlink /etc/machine-id to /dev/random?
OK, from the man page: > The /etc/machine-id file contains the unique machine ID of the local system that is set during installation. The machine ID is a single newline-terminated, hexadecimal, 32-character, lowercase ID. When decoded from hexadecimal, this corresponds to a 16-byte/128-bit value. > The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during system installation and stays constant for all subsequen…
Why is it there in the first place?
https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-uuidgen.1.html has some explanation, in particular: > The important properties of the machine UUID are that 1) it remains unchanged until the next reboot and 2) it is different for any two running instances of the OS kernel. That is, if two processes see the same UUID, they should also see the same shared memory, UNIX domain sockets, local X displays, localhost.localdomain resolu…
Indeed. If that weren't the case, and the "same kernel" were enough, then things could just use /proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but how do you know what programs are misusing it?
This speaks to a more general need for user-friendly audit logs of which resources are accessed by which programs. I should be able to tell on any platform if Spotify called fopen on something in my documents folder.
Why would anyone worry that applications like chrome abuse that file? If chrome wants a unique identifier it could generate it itself.