German police ask for help in identifying a bomber's MAC address

I'm failing to see what provoked such a response, given the comment you're replying to.

A MAC address doesn't prove anything, but courtrooms aren't about proof. They're evidence, not proof, and enough evidence is all the German prosecution should need to have a relatively easy time in court.

As usual, the tech angle to this story doesn't make the story particularly novel, but some tech-oriented people seem to have trouble perceiving that. E.g. people commenting that MAC addresses aren't unique, as if other forms of police descriptions of suspects (like height, hair color, or clothing) are unique...

Only if one normally shits bricks about something that's a 1 in 16 million chance of happening. But if someone does know that their MAC OUI is F8E079, they almost certainly know the rest of the MAC so they can rest easily unless it happens to match the published one.

Also, it's a family included in macchanger, so that makes it ever-more probable that the mac address has - at some point - been used by someone else.

macchanger -l just dumps the list of ~18,000 OUI's known to macchanger, so it doesn't really mean that it's more likely to have been set by someone using macchanger.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfv32dmVFw

Especially if the suspect is black, muslim, immigrant, etc.

Sometimes vendors would burn duplicates by accident. Sometimes they would simply run out and production would loop (there's "only" 16.7mil addrs per manufacturer prefix). Sometimes they print the same run in different geographical areas, because the MAC only matters in a broadcast domain. Often they just wouldn't keep track of what they assigned.

I just think it's funny to realize that people read "unique (to a broadcast domain)" and assumed that could mean "unique (everywhere)" because it's a really big number.

The police is not around to enforce GDPR.