On Monday, 19 November 2018 10:19:12 PST [email protected] wrote: > At one point Intel had the "Big Brother" ID. > > https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-piii-is-big-brother-inside/
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus. Any HW ID you can use in a computer is wrong. If you used the processor's serial number and someone replaced the processor, is it the same computer? If you used the MAC address on the wired Ethernet, but that got replaced with a faster card, is it the same computer? And so on. That is, if you can take all the parts from the old computer, replacing them one at a time with new parts, is it the same computer? And if you do that, and then build a computer out of all the parts you've removed, is the other computer a new one or the old one? Hence the Wikipedia link. This also applies to software: if you use the UUID of the filesystem but reformat, is it the same computer? If you use /etc/machine-id but erase that file (so it gets regenerated on the next boot), is it the same computer? -- Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
