Richest woman in China (at least use to be).... Ran a recycling business. Specializing in electronics. Exactly how she became wealthy. Removing precious metals from often US exports of electronic waste.

Environmental mess from this as practiced there and in India is horrendous and destroyed watersheds and basic land and water poor locals depend upon.

Thanks for showing real world use case for these.

Food stamp thing was replaced by food cards in many States. Same fraud still goes on - just walk down to store with you. Hand you card. You shop. Leave store, give me back my card and my cash.

Worse is corner stores aka bodegas where such handouts are outright misappropriated by filthy owners who cash exchange food funds at 50% or less of value. Many of these stores are owned by foreign nationals.

My old church used to give these kinds of gift cards to community members in need around the holidays (but with like $200, not $10 on them) so people could afford holiday meals, but they didnt want addicts buying alcohol instead of feeding their kids. Seemed like a great gesture at the time, but now that I'm old enough to be aware of people who sell food stamps for drugs I see how this could have easily been used for the same thing.

FUCK this guy... UNCLE HAIR SNIFFER.

Out protecting the illegal invader sex offenders now? This guy is the worst.

Heels up Harris waits in the wings. Remember people, it's 4 years. One term. One and done.

PS: Jeffrey Epstein isn't dead.

It's terrible that this data exists. Well intentioned pathway to hell these IDs are.

It's incomprehensible that anything has or can get access to such values. Such should be lock boxed and only root accessible. Definitely nothing a browser or other shi!tware should be able to retrieve. Yet they can and do. Speaks for the need of standardized JAILS for all programs in any computing environment.

This is a good reference to give distro hoppers a fair chance and reduce search and research fatigue for SystemD-less distros: https://www.slant.co/topics/18348/~linux-distros-that-don-t-use-systemd

Awesome, I'll add that to the blog post. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing. Another good reason to not run systemd !

Im running mxlinux with sysv init.

->cat /etc/machine-id

cat: /etc/machine-id: No such file or directory

😊

That's true. I've set a cronjob to change it every 2hours. Even more reasons to finally move to Artix.

Furthermore, I just tested Tails and they DO change the machine-id after every reboot. I'm downloading Whonix right now as well to test, but I've got shit rural internet so that'll take some time.

I'll update the blog with my finding when I do.

The fact Tails randomizes it after each reboot should be enough to hint that it's likely a good idea to not have any identifying ID tied to your system...

Good to know. I'm planning to switch over to Artix anyway. But for now I'm going to apply the suggested fix.

I think at the time MSN and ICQ were a thing that existed, Win98 was already obsolete. But I could remember wrong.

As far as I remember, Win98 wasn't even capable of connecting to the Internet out of the box.

as someone from dc i agree 100%

I was young and was probably running Win98 with the Yahoo! and Ask! toolbars, with a cool Comet Cursor so I could update my Angelfire site while downloading over Napster. Using Yahoo, MSN and ICQ messengers to connect with my friends from school.

But I could play Age Of Empires and Quake, so that's all I really cared about.

I don't know why machine-id exists, but what I do know is that this only exists on Linux operating systems that use systemd, based on this command:

sudo systemd-machine-id-setup

So the way to avoid it entirely is by switching to a systemd-less Linux, such as Salix OS (clear net only). Actually, systemd has a lot of problems (clear net only), so you should avoid it anyway.

And as to what is it good for besides compromising privacy... I also have no idea. I guess Lennart Poettering Red Hat wanted to do something with it, but they didn't know what to do with it, so they left it as a privacy compromising thing of however many Linux users are being used by systemd.

Honesty, I'm not certain, but it appears in every mainstream distro that uses systemd.

Most people are aware of MAC addresses, but if you search the web for machine-ID being seen as a privacy concern, you'll find nothing.

No need to have a constant, unchanging value that exists from the moment a system is installed.

I'll research it more and update the blog post if I find anything noteworthy.

If you use Adobe anything you have only yourself to blame. It's a contender for worst software creator in all of human history.

Did you skip Win98 or how did that abomination not manage to push you away to Linux?

Maybe people that couldn't figure out how to access pomf.cat?

Only one way to find out.

Everybody would score high this way

Is this a girl?

Who's the fag the downvoted?

Why does this machine-id exist in the first place? What is it good for other than compromising privacy?

I don't Wally World allows you to buy cards with cards.

Impressive interpretation of a coin funnel. His channel has some other useful projects, too.