I cannot believe people tolerate this kind of behavior from such a large company with a huge market.
It does make me wonder if people would react differently if Linux or Apple did the same thing.
GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
31–40 of 106 posts
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#32>Every finding here was reproduced on a real Windows 11 Pro VM (build 26200). Nothing is theoretical. See docs/technical-writeup.md for the evidence, tagged by confidence level.
That's sounds nice and all, but everything about it, from "Nothing is theoretical" to "evidence, tagged by confidence level" goes out the window when you find claude as one of the commit authors, and the content is clearly copy pasted output from claude with very little editing. Worse yet, one of the sources he cites is also clearly AI output.
I'm not even against the use of AI here. I would rather see it clearly say either "this is what claude found after I told it to investigate" or "yes this is generated by claude, but I independently verified each of the points myself".
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#33So, uhh, fuck windows and use Linux if you value your security and privacy?
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#34Or just use Linux.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least Debian and Ubuntu have /etc/machine-id, presumably easily changed - but it’s there.
I mean, there's a ton of unique identifiers on machines already tied to hardware and disks, but that must be a systemd thing since my Devuan machine does not have it. But given there's no cloud accounts on linux I would imagine it's trivially changed just like a NIC's MAC Also, seems unlikely it would be used for any single-signon with cloud services.
I'm guessing Devuan still has /var/lib/dbus/machine-id.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#36I cannot believe people tolerate this kind of behavior from such a large company with a huge market. It does make me wonder if people would react differently if Linux or Apple did the same thing.
Better start believing it; Google Chrome has a 71% market share.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#37> Microsoft provided the FBI with the history of IP addresses tied to that specific GDID. This article, and most articles about this, doesn't explain where FBI got that GDID from. Ok, Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place, and then try to bind that to a person. I found another article that explains the process a bit…
They didn’t. They went to ngrok and asked for all the data at the point of signup. They then looked to find the any of that data at the second site. In this case they had two identical data points - the GDID and the IP address.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#38> Microsoft provided the FBI with the history of IP addresses tied to that specific GDID. This article, and most articles about this, doesn't explain where FBI got that GDID from. Ok, Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place, and then try to bind that to a person. I found another article that explains the process a bit…
I'd take all of this with a cup of salt due to law enforcement's use of parallel construction in tech cases.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#39Or just use Linux.
That's exactly the advice at the end.
Re: GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, there's a ton of unique identifiers on machines already tied to hardware and disks, but that must be a systemd thing since my Devuan machine does not have it. But given there's no cloud accounts on linux I would imagine it's trivially changed just like a NIC's MAC Also, seems unlikely it would be used for any single-signon with cloud services.
I'm guessing Devuan still has /var/lib/dbus/machine-id.
TIL.
/var/lib/dbus/machine-id
/etc/machine-id