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Comment by bbrazil | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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