Re: Microsoft and MACs

[Sujal Shah <sujal@worldnet.att.net>]

It's actually amusing, but Microsoft's network stack reports a MAC
address for modems (all the same).  I wrote a small program once which
reported the MAC address using reference code from MSFT and it used to
pull back something like 44-55-44-55-33-55.

Sort of amusing.

Trying typing in winipcfg on a machine with only a modem (dial-up
adapter, I guess, in win-parlance) or ipconfig on a NT box.

Sujal

Nicholas Petreley wrote:
> 
> "Eric M. Bennett" wrote:
> > I have run across some programmers who suggest using the MAC address as a
> > unique identifier for copy-protection purposes.  But as for legitimate
> > reasons for embedding them in documents?  I have no idea.
> 
> I'm having a really hard time understanding this one.  There is no such
> thing as one MAC address per user, so using a MAC address guarantees
> that MS will have lots of duplicates in the database.  So the "unique
> identifier" theory doesn't make sense.  People without a MAC address
> will either will be left out of the database, or Microsoft will have
> to use a "fake" MAC address as a key for those people.  So it's not
> even a convenient way to create a unique ID -- it would be easier and
> more reliable for the database programmer to write code that makes up
> a new ID for each person who registers.
> 
> I don't want to rule out stupidity, but no matter how hard I try, the
> only motives I can imagine for using a MAC address are sinister.
> 
> -Nick
> 
> ***********************************
> Nicholas Petreley
> IDG Conferences, LinuxWorld,
> InfoWorld
> 
> nicholas@petreley.com
> http://www.petreley.com
> ***********************************

-- 
------ Sujal Shah ---- sujal@worldnet.att.net

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