Re: Microsoft and MACs

[Nicholas Petreley <nicholas@petreley.com>]

Glad to hear there's more info - it makes it seem less suspicious
that they're gathering MAC addresses.  (Of course, that's just
what they WANT you to think...grin)

-Nick

stan johnson wrote:
> 
> ** Reply to note from ericb@pobox.com Tue, 9 Mar 1999 05:29:24 -0500
> > IIRC the MAC address is only one part of Microsoft's ID code.
> 
> That's my recollection of the story as well. The GUID also contains the
> person's name from software installation and, IIRC, hardware and
> software descriptors.
> 
> This pc, my only and purely home-user pc, has no ethernet card. My
> only networking at present is via dialup modem. I looked in my NN/2
> cookies file, and there was a GUID, under both microsoft.com and
> msn.com, or whatever. The identical number! Now I'm wondering, given
> what the win98 GUID is reporting to M$, just what my own GUID is
> reporting. I have no win98 here, but I do have some old win-os2 code,
> from the original win3.1 installation, plus word6 and a few other win
> apps in their own purgatory, all hpfs.
> 
> I wonder if the same 'unintended bug' that win98 contains is also part
> of the M$ cookie-generator at their web sites. Would I be surprised if it
> were? You guess. Since the identical number is entered under two
> different M$ sites, either the second-visited adopted the
> already-existing GUID, or the generation is determinate, based on the
> local configuration. Or both, of course. What is clear is that these M$
> GUIDs are not randomly generated at each site visited.
> 
> In fairness, I have to acknowledge that there were lots of other IDs in
> cookies.txt from other sites. How they all are generated and what info
> they convey I have of course no idea whatever.
> 
> stan
> 
> --
> Stan Johnson
> sjohnson@gwi.net
> 03/09/99 11:04am

-- 

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Nicholas Petreley 
IDG Conferences, LinuxWorld,
InfoWorld

nicholas@petreley.com
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