Hacker News Reader

Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

For those like me who were not abreast of this issue: the FBI was able to arrest some kid who hacked/is alleged to have hacked a jewellery retailer through a VPN. They were able to track the hacker via the user's GDID, which is a stable identifier unaffected by VPN usage.

This surveillance is certainly going to expand in scope as age verification comes into widespread usage. Personally I see little legitimate use case for this telemetry. It seems only useful for the purposes of tracking users for law enforcement or targeted advertising purposes.

View on HN

How did they query his GDID/PUID to make the arrest though? Does the browser have access to it during some requests? Also, if it’s stored as plaintext, what’s stopping anyone from randomizing it on machine startup?

I'm guessing Ngrok gets subpoena'd, hands over the IP who created the account, page access timestamp, etc - FBI hands over to Microsoft, finds which Windows PCs were active with a certain IP on that time period, tries to correlate other characteristics such as OS version or anything to get a single hit, and then return other IPs used by that machine and everything else they have, like SmartDefender / Edge telemetry.

> finds which Windows PCs were active with a certain IP on that time period

.. and how do they do that?

While we're on the subject of telemetry, has anyone got a GDPR orientated writeup of what's known?

Well, it's a darn good thing there is nothing like that over here on the Linux side. I'm pretty sure that if e.g. systemd attempted to generate a unique, persistent machine identifier during the installation process, it'd be shot down and patched off extremely quickly.

Linux does though?

  cat /etc/machine-id

https://www.linux.org/docs/man1/systemd-machine-id-setup.htm...

cool. we definitely needed this

Not wanting to be left out, FreeBSD has it too.

Is this sarcasm?

This isn't "tracking", this is attribution in a court. The defence can't stand there and say "That's not him/this device" when the forensics point exactly at it.

It's still tracking. Just like tracking your car movements to attribute them to you is still tracking.

To be fair, the courts in USA apparently have a different definition of tracking than all normal people do. Speaking of car movements, Flock claims this isn't tracking people based on some legalese mumbojumbo. Obviously, this and GPs claims are absolutely ridiculous if you speak English, but are apparently true in american legalese doublespeak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com