Post #1391

You’ll see that the command, when ran a minute or more apart, will produce new values now. me@virtbox-testing:~$ cat /etc/machine-id && cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id b722903d87994e24b6378289262c3021 b722903d87994e24b6378289262c3021 me@virtbox-testing:~$ cat /etc/machine-id && cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id 4352c41ad7fb4a05a54b0942c5c27cb0 4352c41ad7fb4a05a54b0942c5c27cb0 In closing Uniquely identifying ID’s are rarely a good thing when you take privacy into consideration, and although these items have their purpose in limited use cases it doesn’t appear that generating a new unique ID every minute has any downsides. What do you think? Is this a pointless privacy practice or a needed, but often overlooked part in maintaining privacy in the modern age? Let us know in the comments below. Additional Thoughts After publishing this article, we received some feedback that I’d like to touch base on here. Testing the high privacy, pro-anonymity Tails-OS shows that you receive a new machine-id after every reboot. Props to Tails-OS! Testing the privacy and anonymity promoting Whonix-OS shows that they do not issue a new machine-ID after every reboot. A commenter on a [RAMBLE] post mentions that MXLinux does not use systemd, and thus does not use a machine-id. Here is a list of Linux operating systems that do not use systemd. (And will not have a machine-id) Yes, there are other uniquely identifying aspects on all systems. From device serial numbers to MAC addresses. The purpose of this post was to discuss a lesser discussed unique identifer: machine-id.