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Comment by papaver | Hacker News Reader

interestingly enough, top ten ios devices names:

  42797 'iPhone'    
  5191 'iPod touch'
  3136 '“Administrator”的 iPad'
  2202 '“Administrator”的 iPhone'
  1534 'Owner’s iPad'
  1453 ' iPhone'
  1309 'Administrator’s iPad'
  1196 'Administrator’s iPhone'
  1141 'PdaTX.Net'
  1058 'John’s iPad'

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If you look at the UDID's for the '“Administrator”的 iPad's or '“Administrator”的 iPhone's, there seems to be an incremental pattern in their first 2-3 digits. Does that mean these devices were purchased/ordered in bulk and hence belong to some reseller? In which case, these must not have been sold to people and thus we don't see change in the Device names maybe? And thus the claim that this came from one or two apps seems a bit infeasible, no?

maybe an enterprise location or school that bought in bulk?

Wouldn't the devices' names still be changed when individual members of the enterprise/school activated them?

Devices being used in a kiosk-like or other setting in which they are mostly not being used by people who would be responsible for activating them?

I replied elsewhere. Isn't it possible this is just a side-effect of how the data was exported?

Primary sort is by username. Secondary sort is by UDID.

The Chinese character "的" is being used here as a possessive; it just means that the iPad belongs to the "Administrator", which is the default account name for many Windows XP computers [1]. Because iTunes activates iPods, iPhones, and iPads under the current user account name, and because the default user account names in many XP installations is "Administrator", there are a plethora of devices with the same name: '“Administrator”的 iPad'.

So, the only significance of this name is that there are quite a few Chinese Apple devices in this sample. Perhaps they are over-represented in the whole dataset; it's hard to say without having the breakdown of Apple devices sold by country, as well as the entire dataset.

1. http://www.mydigitallife.info/unhide-the-administrator-accou...

The UDID is a SHA1 of a few fields (including a couple MAC addresses): we actually know the exact algorithm; if you are seeing patterns in them it is either a trick your brain is playing on you or a trick the user is playing on you (some people modify their UDID occasionally to keep themselves from being tracked by apps).

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