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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Machine-id is read as plaintext by programs and transmitted as plaintext by programs.
Hashing the unique id from the host side as opposed to trusting programs to read it and act in a way the user understands and deems appropriate is a much better method of handling calls to identify the equipment than just letting programs read your standardized unique id.
And the above would literally solve something, it would keep programs from just walking directly across the mat tee posing to get a unique id and force them to do some kind of jetpack backflip routine that, when presented to a court, is much more tenuous.
[citation needed]
Anything that does that is spyware and if you're aware of anything that does this you should be doing us all a public service and sharing.
I can build something in maybe 10 minutes that will fingerprint your machine to like 99.99% uniqueness. This solution solves nothing. But now we're just repeating ourselves.
Go take it to the systemd folks yourself and see how they respond.
here’s a fifteen year old stack overflow thread where someone asks where a unique system identifier can be read and someone suggests machine-id.
Lest that be considered old and bad information, I just checked /etc/machine-id on a new install of Debian 13 and the permissions were 444, readable by owner, group and everyone else.
So programs can read machine-id. If programs can read it they can transmit it. I hope someone capable of writing a program that can id my machine doesn’t need a proof of that.
Further, programs reading machine-id don’t necessarily fall into the spyware category by default like you say. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to request a machine specific identifier.
Getting rid of the literal “papers please!” “Okay officer!” File literally makes investigation more difficult and puts a barrier up to tracking where there was none before. Presenting a unique hashed output based on the systems machine-id prevents a tracking method that is currently as easy as read file -> get identifier.
The fact that other methods of tracking exist doesn’t make preventing this method not worthwhile and you should be ashamed for suggesting that.
Never said things can't read it (in fact, that's very intentional). I even linked you the man page that lays all that out for you. I'm saying your claim that things are transmitting it is baseless. You stated your speculation as fact.
If anything is transmitting this ID it should be considered spyware.
Whatever, I'm just repeating the same thing over and over again as if your reading comprehension will somehow get better.