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Comment by joiqj | Hacker News Reader

As part of my standard (and pretty lame) OPSEC I always change the default names that apple gives its devices (like "Joiqj's iPhone") to a more generic name (like "iPhone"). Nice to see that it was good practice.

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I do the opposite: one of my laptops is named "Peter's iPhone" (hint: my name is not Peter, nor do I own an iPhone) and I've also set all my Bluetooth to random Bluetooth headset or mouse models.

I like this idea, but any sophisticated attacker will ignore the Bluetooth names and just pull vendors off the MAC addresses. Though it would be interesting if you can define the Bluetooth MAC addressees in software to match your fake names :)

I used to do something similar with my router. I would run an AP called "Linksys" or something common and give it an OUI belonging to Cisco. It probably had no benefit (maybe even harmful!), but it was fun to "disguise" my OpenBSD router as a common off the shelf router.

I name my computer: 'router'

To be fair, it probably will route if you ask it.

My hotspot on my phone is "FBI van 4"

I see this joke frequently when looking at available wifi; is this meme a reference to a particular thing (other than the FBI having surveillance vans) or did a bunch of people just converge onto it?

I saw it as a meme years a go. I sadly don't know the origin.

I've never seen it. Maybe it's spreading like a fungus from wifi to wifi in certain regions.

Some years ago there was a lot of stuff on 4Chan about “FBI party van”, “vanned”, v&, etc. I’m guessing that’s part of where it has come from.

One of the hotspots in my flat is called "Honeypot1"

My blog is honeypot.net. It’s always fun to watch people trying to decide whether to click that link.

I wonder if I can sell my WiFI AP name to some advertiser...

"ENJOY COCA-COLA"

or more likely

"TOM BRADY SAYS BUY CRYPTO"

"DRINK PEPSI"

In the early days of insecure WiFi, in apartment buildings you would see network names like "Don't steal our WiFi Room 238!"

Hey! I'm FBI and NSA Guest :)

I just set mine to the RDS name of some local FM station..

Bluetooth on my old phone is named as "Pfizer-BioNTech chip #<formatteddigits>" :D

That reminded me that almost 10 years ago ghacks [1] instructed people to add _nomap to their Wifi networks name to avoid these being harvested by Google and Mozilla. I wonder if that ever worked or still does and if companies stopped collecting that information.

[1] - https://www.ghacks.net/2014/10/29/add-_nomap-to-your-routers...

Officially this is still supported. With that said, there have in past years been data sanitizing failures which get them mapped anyway. Google caught a little flack for that several years ago.

It might sound a bit silly, but I've had pretty good results just naming my devices after Pokemon. Whenever I have a new device, I open the Pokemon DB[0], choose one at random, and then add it to my .csv file of device names -> what they are and what role they perform.

[0]: https://www.pokemon.com/uk/pokedex

I do the same thing but with Star Trek words! I have a somewhat logical naming scheme too. Computers are named after Star Trek ships (Yorktown), phones are named after handheld devices (Phaser), and drives are storage related things (Isolinear). And my printers are just named Replicator and Synthesizer.

This is fun.

Rather than choosing at random, I like to pick names that have some relation to the device in question, e.g. "Pichu" for a tiny mobile device, "Snorlax" for the big slow machine, "Articuno/Zapdos/Moltres" for three successive powerful servers, etc. What's extra fun about Pokemon, if you're familiar with the franchise, is that you can pick names based on generation, with older generations for e.g. older devices, and if you're _really_ familiar with the franchise you could even pick names based on types or other characteristics.

Very similar here. PCs get Pokémon region names (MacBook is Johto), non-PC Ethernet connected devices get Professor names, all other devices are Pokémon.

Oh, I do the same! For instance, zygarde is my 14TB NAS, which I consider pretty big. I'm not familiar with the franchise though :)

I was so proud of my spec'd out M1 Max MacBook Pro that I named it "Arceus", the god of the Pokemon universe.

My company uses codenames like this for our services and it drives me insane every time I have to go look up which is which or mentally convert to the name it should have been given.

At work, let's just call things what they are.

Sounds like that would be a perfect simple application for a go/ link or a Raycast extension, just saying :p

My go-to is either gods from Norse mythology, or Transformers for servers.

I set my iPhone to an emoji, and apparently it's one of the emojis that is composed of multiple emojis to render correctly. It's fun to see how every device it connects to draws the emoji or more likely boxes a little different.

If youlook for a naming scheme: this wiki has you covered

https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page

I've been using chili peppers (peri, shishito, ancho, ...) for my devices for the last few years. Many years before that, I was using named swords (notung, glamdring, sting, etc).

Back in college my boss named a sun workstation lab with aleutian islands, and another after indonesian islands. (Some of those were fun to remember, there was an umnak and an unimak.) The servers were named after seas and oceans. We tried to name a new lab of windows machines after bugs, but the department nixed that.

I've historically preferred to use Culture series ship names (eg. GCU Grey Area, GCU Jaundiced Outlook, etc.), but stopped after Elon started naming his SpaceX ships like that.

I then went for Scottish Single Malt names (eg. Laphroaig, Jura, etc.).

After quitting alcohol, I've now settled on Douglas Adams names (eg. Deep Thought, Grunthos the Flatulent, etc.).

Naming machines is the most fun part of the job.

This is not silly at all :-)

Seems pretty in line with the RFC about this https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1178.txt

I do something similar but with other mobile/gacha game characters since those names are always in abundance. I also try to do some kind of correlation with the fictional settings too (groups of devices will correspond to meaningful in-domain names)

For non-mobile devices like workstations or servers, I also tend to directly give FQDN, like (name).(location).(my-personal-domain.tld)

I do the same, mostly because I don't like my full name showing up in every subpath of the home directory. Sometimes this leaks far beyond your local computer, too, since many build tools include some path info in the compiled binaries. You can download apps from the app store, run `strings` on them, and find the username of the developer who built the binary.

I do that too. So if we’re on the same network and conflict, it’ll become “iPhone (1)”, etc.

I prefix all my device names with “My”. My iPhone, My AirPods, My MacBook Air, and so on.

I use a random person's name because anonymous could be me but e.g. Josephine most definitely isn't a bloke.

A lesson learned with early feature phones and Bluetooth names in high school

At home my wifis are currently Japanese emojis, but anything funny goes

Ideally you'd use the most common name, in order to maximize the size of your anonymity set. So you could go with "John Appleseed" to get a "john" home directory and a "John's MacBook Pro" hostname. But in a small community, to local observers seeing your device on bluetooth screens, you might get weird looks ("there is no John here, why is this sus?") whereas "iPhone" looks like a default. And for non-local observers, your choice of a name like "John" suggests you're a westerner named John. So by just going with "iPhone" or "MacBook" you're in a smaller anonymity set but also not drawing attention to yourself in your local area, and not externally leaking information like your locale (although of course you could always leave a false trail by using a cyrillic hostname).

Some other leaky, seemingly private identifiers are SSH pubkeys (I always delete the comment trailer), which are sent to every server you SSH to and also published to places like GitHub, and WiFi SSIDs (which are visible to any application with access to the network stack, and unfortunately aren't entirely within your control - often a list of nearby SSIDs, combined with a mapping of SSID to geolocation, is enough to triangulate your location to within a meter, which is one of many reasons I disable WiFi in favor of ethernet whenever possible).

> seemingly private identifiers are SSH pubkeys (I always delete the comment trailer), which are sent to every server you SSH to and also published to places like GitHub

I use this in my .ssh/config file:

  Host *
    IdentitiesOnly = yes

... then you'll only send keys that are specified per-host in .ssh/config with 'IdentityFile' or with a command-line argument.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10004678

I've always wondered if there was any downside to having my default private keyfile being shared whenever I fail to use the "-i" option to specify the correct keyfile when authenticating against a new server.

Thanks for linking to the previous HN discussion!

The hostname is derived from the admin user's name, which ought to also be fake. My "full name," unix username, and hostname are all a nice short "me".

As of iOS 16, apps need special permission to get the device name now (I think it just returns "iOS" instead). Not sure about MacOS.

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