iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14::“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.

  • @Confuserated
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    6111 months ago

    tl;dr It was a bug. It is fixed in 17.1.

    • @sir_reginald
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      5911 months ago

      this is whitewashing Apple. It was introduced in iOS 14. A trillion dollar company like apple should have had this fixed long before.

      • @[email protected]
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        1411 months ago

        Lol, and Apple didn’t even “discover” it themselves. It was 2 unaffiliated security researchers who did. Who knows if they even implemented any logic besides the UI.

        • @poopkins
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          811 months ago

          If you had read the article, you would have known that the bug relates to a very specific field inside a multicast payload and a network-specific unique MAC address is generated and retained as advertised. I’m not defending Apple; just reiterating the facts.

          • @eskimofry
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            011 months ago

            The way multicast works is that the destination mac address starts with 01 00 5e and then next 3 octets (mac addresses are 6 octets long) are copied from the IP address lower octets. The mac address is always this when building the L2 headers for the packet.

            • @poopkins
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              111 months ago

              It’s not specified what precisely is provided in the payload of the multicast body. I suspect that the original MAC address is included in something like a Bonjour broadcast, but I wasn’t able to find any documentation that confirms that.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        apple should have had this fixed long before

        not if it was intentional. I mean apple bends over for authoritarian governments around the world. This could easily be used as a state surveillance apparatus and casually “fixed” when discovered down the road as a “bug”.

        • @sir_reginald
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          511 months ago

          yeah I agree that it was intentional. I can’t believe Apple didn’t properly test this feature. But I didn’t want to speculate without actual proof

          • @SuckMyWang
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            411 months ago

            Why not? Everyone else seems to be doing it, you’re probably just some Portuguese pastrie chef with a bad hair cut and a paid off mortgage

    • @danc4498
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      811 months ago

      Hmm, tldr bot didn’t mention this…

      • @ForgotAboutDre
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        1911 months ago

        This is why we call it artificial intelligence, rather than digital intelligence.