moonwalkers-shenanigans

The quest of generating a new machine id on boot. So I'm back to doing some weird-ass shit. This time my target was the machine id on linux. I mean it's an id, which can potentially identify your machine right? I'm probably wrong here. But what if your machine id was never permanent... Now that's interesting.

First of all, how do you find the machine id file? It's not like linux is gonna store that in registry or something, do you think this os is windows like? Think again! I guess you can find a path to the machine id file with a find command or just by searching with your favourite search engine. Looks like there are 2 paths to the machine id file: /var/lib/dbus/machine-id and /etc/machine-id, and if we want to generate a new machine id, we will need to delete both of them.

Now for generating a new id it's simple: you can use a dbus-uuidgen command with a —ensure option, in order to make sure it's not regenerating the id if the file already exists.

My final script looks like this: rm /etc/machine-id rm -v /var/lib/dbus/machine-id dbus-uuidgen —ensure=/etc/machine-id dbus-uuidgen —ensure

if you want to run this on startup, you will need to get a bit creative and write a systemd service(if you're on systemd). Since I know that not everyone uses systemd I'm not posting the contents of the systemd service file here. feel free to let me know if I should post the systemd service file or host this on gitlab or something.

#privacy #linux

I'm back with an another post... for some reason. This time I'll talk about esims. So tf are those esims anyway? Esim stands for embedded subscriber identity module(I think), it's basically a piece of hardware in your phone which saves all of the info, which is required to connect to a mobile network. To simplify this, it's a normal sim, but embedded in your phone. Here my thoughts about them: Pros: takes less space, free second sim slot, fairly easy to add it to your phone(depends on your phone's UI) Cons: no user authentication everytime phone tries to connect to the network, changing devices can be a pain(since you need to get a new qr code issued), saved sims stay on your phone after a factory reset. I'd say that it's a nice piece technology, but I think that it will kinda make our privacy situation worse, because esims force you to use a single device.