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Comment by capitainenemo | Hacker News Reader

I mean, there's a ton of unique identifiers on machines already tied to hardware and disks, but that must be a systemd thing since my Devuan machine does not have it.

But given there's no cloud accounts on linux I would imagine it's trivially changed just like a NIC's MAC

Also, seems unlikely it would be used for any single-signon with cloud services.

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I'm guessing Devuan still has /var/lib/dbus/machine-id.

TIL.

    /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

Exists on Slackware64 15.0 but

    /etc/machine-id

Does not.

You're right. I have no idea what it's for, but I'm guessing for distinguishing between deployment images. I'm certainly not going to get too concerned about it.

The issue with the microsoft account was not unique IDs - tons of unique things on a machine.... it was a unique thing tied to an account and shipped to remote places.

There are _some_ cloud accounts for linux such as Ubuntu One, which I would fear could have similar identification capabilities if ever forced by to do so by a 3-letter agency

Any sort of online service you're logged into is going to have your IP and account correlated with a timestamp. Dropbox, GDrive, and even your e-mail provider. While a device identifier might be more useful it's not like the lack a device ID will keep you from being tracked.

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