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Comment by stuckagain | Hacker News Reader

All of the ones with click thru terms of service are logging your MAC too.

My personal favorite open wifi service is the one on Amtrak, and you can buy a paper ticket with cash. Pretty anonymous.

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Any AP knows your MAC, as that's the basis of how Ethernet works.

Changing your MAC address is possible on most operating systems, if you're at that level of paranoia.

If you where leaking a document that involved the NSA/GCHQ I'm not sure it would be paranoia or that there is a sufficient level of paranoia.

They aren't Godlike but I'll admit the Snowden revelations surprised me and I'd been following that stuff for years.

And there's nothing special about your MAC, changing your address is as easy as editing a single setting.

Yes thanks. The point is those click-thru landing pages work by temporarily whitelisting your MAC, which means they have a list of MACs somewhere. The MAC information needed by ordinary networks is ephemeral.

Even without click-throughs. Comcast Business routers keep a log of every MAC that's ever connected wirelessly. Granted I think it's a bug as it causes the MAC whitelisting page to take like a minute to load.

Even my Mikrotik at home logs MACs by default. The log is small and not persisted, but log entries definitely stick around a few days.

Don't count on your MAC not being logged.

And if the router itself isn't doing it, there are programs like arpwatch.

DHCP also works by recording your MAC (so that you can renew your IP, and another computer can't). Most DHCP servers write their lease files to disk. Most also log to disk. I wouldn't consider the absence of a captive portal to be a strong signal.

I wish Apple would extend the mac randomization for probe packets to normal operation (as an optional setting).

Hypothetical:

A journalist uses some apple computer. If its new, Tails won't be able to establish a network interface, so maybe there is a usb wifi dongle as well.

When entering boot mode (restart with option key pressed), in order to select Tails, wifi networks are shown.

You are suggesting that Apple is leaking the MAC address of the computer to all AP before Tails is even selected to boot from.

This suggests that any MAC address randomization the user intended to use for the built in computer wifi or the dongle via Tails will be partially defeated.

Many AP will log the original MAC immediately and one (the one chosen for wifi after Tails boots) will log the randomized Tails MAC.

Is this correct assumption?

EDIT: After rereading it sounds like you are saying they DO randomize probe packets and the scenario I describe above does not occur, NO MAC is leaked during Tails boot selection process on apple hardware.

Can anyone confirm this?

Does MAC address randomization apply to desktops/laptops? Google implies its iOS-only.

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