Re: Microsoft and MACs

["Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>]

Paul Rickard wrote:

>From:           	"Eric M. Bennett" <ericb@pobox.com>
>
>> This is not correct.
>
>	You'll note in my posting that I said "every modern network card,"
>not "every network card ever shipped." Modern cards have a preset,
>unchangable (unless you want to get into Flash ROM and things like
>that) MAC address. I'm not referring to Tokenring or the 1981-era card
>you bought at a place that sold hardware and fish bait.
>
>> For example, Apple Computer used to distributed an unsupported
>> program called "Apple LAN Utility" which could be used to change the
>> MAC address sent out by the machine on its ethernet
>> packets.
>
>	Again, notice the "used to" in your own statement.
>
>If anyone else on this list knows of a modern widely-used type of NIC
>that has configurable MAC addresses, post it here and I will stand
>corrected. Otherwise, I'm sticking to what I said earlier.


First generation PowerMacs, sold in 1994-95, were compatible with Apple LAN
utility.  There are plenty of those machines out there.  Whether this fits
your definition of modern or not I don't know, but I think there are enough
of these machines out there that anybody who wants to impersonate your MAC
address could get ahold of one very easily.





--
Eric Bennett ( http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/ )
Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Cornell University
377 Olin Chemistry Lab

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-  Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery