Fine. Why would it? The device has a unique hardware ID that’s even easier/better for identifying the device. MAC addresses are randomized, and there’s at least 3 of them in any modern phone. Seems overly complicated and ineffective.

previous self-immolators have been thoroughly ignored

Arguably a self imolator ended the war in Vietnam. He absolutely got the ball rolling.

I created an account on a hosted service we use at work the other day, my password had to be exactly 12 characters. No more no less.

I’m not saying they can’t track you. I’m saying the person who told you that they’re not doing it by MAC was right, and your reply was not only wrong but painfully self righteous for a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about about.

Also, changing your IP, clearing cookies, and installing a plugin that obfusticates your browser fingerprint ought to be enough. The second two are essentially what you did by blowing out your OS.

Still annoying but an improvement

Sure, and all of that goes out the window on a mobile app that doesn’t play by browser rules.

This has nothing to do with browser rules. It’s how tcp/ip works.

And 96% of reddit is on mobile

And 100% of phones have a unique hardware ID visable to any app with the “read phone state” permission. Why the hell would anyone use a MAC address to identify you? And which MAC address would they use? The wifi nic? The mobile nic? The Bluetooth MAC?

Idk about iPhones but MAC addresses on android are randomized by default. Maybe learn even the tiniest bit about what you’re talking about before you go calling people naive.

That’s not naivety it’s a basic understanding of how networking works

And fewer people quoting entire Simpsons episodes at each other line by line

Oh my bad, I didn’t realize they weren’t keeping on top of apple’s architecture changes

Pretty much anything valve released on the source engine. TF2, half life 2, portal 2, either of the left 4 dead games, all run on Mac and have co-op modes.

He was originally fleeing rape charges in Sweden so yeah, he still would have had to hide.

And serial rapist, let’s not forget that

I haven’t met a Linux user that would consider leaving the factory installed OS instead of immediately blowing it out and installing their own

That’s a great idea

I’ve never been in a spray paint section at a store where people hadn’t opened the cans and painted all over everything. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

That’s not an effective metric because you don’t know the network speed of the host that the user was downloading from. It’s impossible to tell if the network is slow, or the site they visited was throttled to .5mb. speed tests work because the server you’re downloading from is a known entity

Good idea on theory but it would have to constantly be doing speed tests in the background and those eat up a ton of bandwidth. All the phone knows is what kind of network it’s connected to and what kind of signal strength it has

Nobody’s violating your rights by publishing an update to the software they provide. If you don’t like it android gives you an option to freeze apps at a particular version. You can let go of your pearls now.

If we’re being pedantic TOS is the only one that’s actually named “star trek”.

You would not. In the example given 169.254.1.1 doesn’t even exist, no machine is listening on that address so it couldn’t possibly do any good if it wanted to