I always wondered if there isn't someone out there making dodgy devices with mac addresses in someone else's range.
We started getting tech support complaints when we sold the product into China. Turns out, an enterprising vendor bought a single usb+network printer, desoldered the EEPROM (containing the ethernet mac address). Then that vendor bought usb-only (cheaper) products, added the additional parts and bulk copied the single eeprom image (with the mac address) onto the new products, selling them as the more expensive usb+network sku. Result: a dozen+ of our product running on the LAN with the same mac address.
And /u/linuxlizard, if you don't mind saying, were you using speech-to-text to write that comment?
I think homophone spelling errors are a different issue though - english education in the US is really quite poor so a lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large - people will hear a term in conversation and start using it in their own speech, when they arrive at typing it out they'll make their best guess at spelling and it'll probably end up a roll of the dice which homophone their spell-check ends up shoveling them towards.
1. /me types while admitting they constantly type in spoken english - preferring the spoken sentence construction rules. Something something glass houses and stones.
This is false. It was impressed into us many times throughout grade, middle, and high school. People just don’t care enough to get the right spelling because they were using the words natively long before they learned to spell them.
I wonder if I'm unconsciously mimicking errors from others, or if something in my brains has changed.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stock-keeping-unit-sku....
[1] in fact, back in my student days most NICs I had were cheap knock-off versions, the "real" things were not the inexpensive items they are today. This predates it being common to have one built into your motherboard, even more expensive ones, by some time.