None of the articles I’ve read about this explains how the GDID gets mapped onto the user’s activity.
“Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page”
So does it mean that Windows monitors your activity outwith just Microsoft services and sends all data to their servers? Is it maybe MS Edge history sync?
I wonder if windows 10 has the same feature?
I would be amazed if it didn’t.
By design.
Also 10. And 8. Maybe since Vista actually…
It’s probably since XP at least. Probably introduced in some form in NT.
I used xp-Antispy to cut off the telemetry back in the day.
There’s a very easy trick to defeat this: use Linux.
No you don’t understand… I’ve spent the last 30 years investing in increasingly awful software companies to create “industry standards” and leaving these companies behind would require me to change and learn!!!
At some point you just have to leave the software behind. That time is now!
I talked with the women i’m working with where we print our price lists about changing from adobe to something else and she told me it would be a bad idea since it would make both of our work much more buggy and time consuming with more chances of the end result being worse. So i’ll keep using indesing and the adobe suite for now but i did switch from sketchup to blender for 3D modeling and it’s a bit challenging and more messy then i’m used to but i get better rendering results from what i tried so far.
As long as you can export to the same format, it shouldn’t matter from the print shop’s perspective, no? They just see the same file they would’ve always seen.
The way we work together is by exchanging full fresh indesing pakages that contain the main indd, the idml, a pdf, the links folder and the fonts folder so that we always have everything we need.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, I don’t know anything about graphics design, just about the technology behind it.
Why do you send all these things as separate files? Is just a rasterised or vector export of the project not enough?
Sounds like the design world really needs a standardised container format that can contain all these separate things otherwise.
Even worse!
Admitting that I was not always doing the most sensible thing, at all times! That I was actually doing really stupid things, for a long time!
I … I can’t make mistakes… no … reality is wrong!
Realizing you’re making mistakes and continuing anyway is the problem.
Yes, I’m trying to be hyperbolically facetious, to illustrate that.
So many issues with the world boils down to that last part, people refusing to change and learn. I never understood it, I’ve always loved change and learning. I’ve seen so many people go from having that same openness to only caring about keeping everything the same and never learning, it’s really disturbing. Some are like that from a very early age, others fall into it at any other part of their lives and it’s never a good thing IMO.
For me, I’ve got a million interests. I could change and learn this one thing, but that would take time away from learning about other, more personally interesting things.
If that hacker only knew about tracking by Windows…
If your system uses systemd, it has an etc/machine-id, which is used for a lot of different things. And changing it will break a lot of stuff, probably until you reboot. I guess you could write something to randomly shuffle it every time you reboot? But it is the go-to way for lots of programs (including browsers) to identify themselves. Which means (unless you have done the work to scramble your machine ID) you can be tracked on Linux as well.
Where in the source does Firefox expose machine-id to websites?
With a quick grep I’m only seeing it around audio?
The difference is that Linux isn’t sending telemetry to some central entity associating that ID to an IP.
Microsoft’s records showed that at that exact same minute, a Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page. Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account.
This article is super vague about this as well. How does Microsoft not only have the GDID->IP link, but they have Web history as well? Are they just exposing all this through advertising telemetry?
Fucking gross. And if you know of anything on Linux exposing/transmitting the machine-id, please do let everyone know because nothing should. Anything that does should be considered malware.
Another user said they think machine-id is readable by the browser. This is absolutely true, machine-id is working as described when it is read by any web browser.
So Linux isn’t sending your unique id to a central entity that can associate it with your ip, it’s sending your unique id to any entity you browse to that can then associate it with your ip.
If you’re really worried about that, just change it every time you boot or something. There’s a kernel parameter to change it.
There is not a parameter to automatically change it every time the system boots, that solution doesn’t work for machines that don’t reboot often and it breaks stuff in systemd as volunteered by many people talking about it online and as verified by me two weeks ago when I tried that.
I never said there was. There is however a kernel parameter to change the machine id, which I did say.
It’s intended to be read by applications on the system. That’s like its whole purpose. If you know of any browsers sending it or otherwise making it available without hashing it with an application key first, that would be a problem.
Yes as I said it’s working as intended. The point of machine id is to id a machine.
A better solution would be to not rely on the various programs to hash the unique id and instead have the host read it, hash it and provide the hash to the program that asked.
Yes as I said it’s working as intended. The point of machine id is to id a machine.
Your claim was that Linux was “sending your unique id to any entity you browse” which is misleading at best.
machine-idshould never be transmitted and if it is, that software should be considered spyware.A better solution would be to not rely on the various programs to hash the unique id and instead have the host read it, hash it and provide the hash to the program that asked.
That doesn’t solve anything, really. There’s plenty of ways to fingerprint a machine that doesn’t involve the
machine-id.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.
This article is super vague about this as well. How does Microsoft not only have the GDID->IP link, but they have Web history as well? Are they just exposing all this through advertising telemetry?
My interpretation was that they had an IP that they suspected was the perp’s home network, and subpoena’d some major platforms to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt. Given the perp’s sloppiness in using the same machine for both personal and illicit computing activities, they could even have some network traffic in the capture to indicate which platforms they should subpoena
Or if we want to be more conspiracy-minded, maybe they installed a trojan on his computer and this is the parallel evidence trail that law enforcement created so they don’t have to admit to hacking the hackers
It’s not just Windows tracking your web browsing history. GPU drivers do it too. Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/intel-windows-driver-to-now-collect-user-telemetry-data-like-website-categories-by-default/
That’s wild. Shit like this makes me distrust proprietary drivers
I distrust proprietary anything at this point
It’s not just Windows tracking your web browsing history. GPU drivers do it too.
…on Windows. if you explicitly install their malware and agree to data sharing.
I should have clarified, but yes it’s the windows GPU drivers. Though even on Linux, it’s hard to know what the proprietary GPU drivers do, but from what I read they don’t collect telemetry by default. Luckily Nvidia is developing official open source drivers now so we won’t have to worry about these things.
Also note that for the Windows Nvidia drivers, it’s fairly annoying to disable all telemetry. It’s not just an option in the installer. You have to use unofficial third party tools.
i think i remember hearing the dbus machine-id being read by google chrome on linux. it could be used for privacy violation with proprietary software, though i personally consider linux machines with chrome or equivalent software installed compromised.
also there’s the TPM chip.
Upvoting both comments for awareness, since Linux is the first of a multi-step process, not a privacy panacea.
But we must be clear that in both theory and practice there’s little comparison between modern Windows and systemd machine-user association.
Someone using Windows regularly has a gaping wound, is actively bleeding out. Switching to Linux is just a tourniquet, but every other treatment is at best no-effect until that tourniquet is applied.
Also as a life long programmer, I have this feeling it is possible to just go in and make some changes so I can have the system just make shit up about the TPM while indeed also doing the equivalent of having system-d decide to respond with random bullshit.
Don’t even need to be a programmer, just find a community of them that you trust that distribute their own “fixes”.
Definitely not doing that with anything else because its both hidden in compilation and buried like herpes across multiple components. Probably/hopefully not directly related but I really want to know what they changed to break the clipboard service.
And you’d be technically correct, the best kind of correct.
To the inquisitor:
any distro that’s fully OSS can be fully compiled from scratch with any modifications you choose).
Though yes, if you’re still using Windows, the learning curve may look like a wall.
I really want to know what they changed to break the clipboard service
Guessing the X11 [X]Wayland migration KDE Plasma bug report? Should be fixed in 6.5.2.
Sorry, switched contexts there. Microsoft broke their clipboard service recently which makes me think they added “telemetry” collecting logic somewhere in there.
Oh right, I misread. And yeah not sure (my win32 repro targets have all been locked for a while) but with all the facepalm regressions I’ve read about lately it really could be anything.
Adjacent comment. I’ve found working in a true posix environment is drastically better than the oddities I dealt with Win32. One annoyance is Microsoft has never been able to implement
fork().Though i never messed with x11 as I was never motivated to see what it was like under the figurative hood.
It really is a hell of a lot more sane, instantly missed once you don’t have it. And yeah Fork’s a blessing when used with care lol
Please elaborate on what u are referring to with regard to systemd machine user association?
Yeah, motherboard-level tracking is scary because even the OS won’t be able to detect it. The truly paranoid people (and security researchers) go as far as desoldering chips to ensure nothing phones home.
I wouldn’t call overhauling your entire operating system, including finding alternatives to software you use daily, making sure your hardware is compatible and relearning your entire work method as an “easy trick”.
In any other context I’d agree with you, but hacking is the one context where you really do want to do things the hard way. Use ephemeral VMs with passwords only saved in your head, have a dedicated machine for your illegal activities to help isolate your real identity from your hacking.
Honestly even if you’re just doing HackTheBox and similar best practice is to spin up a Kali VM and only use that VM for the activity since you’re literally connecting to a network with a bunch of hackers, even though what you’re doing is entirely above the board
I think you might actually be surprised…
So they’re saying that all these “secret” societies online, like the Peter Thiel psychopathy, are relatively easily identified and rounded up and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and they’re just choosing not to do it? I’m shocked.
I mean Epstein was actively talking about his crimes over plaintext Gmail
Why would they catch pedophiles? Their founder is one
The level of naivete to think it’s a good idea using a microsoft account on a microsoft product for your illegal activity is astounding. Especially when you consider the amount of technical knowledge required to do such a thing.
I legitimately cannot make that connection, Microsoft has never been shy about tracking you or their tight relationship with 3 letter agencies. It doesn’t take a genius to know they are going to snitch, I figured that was a foregone conclusion.
Kids need to learn about OPSEC.
Yeah. What a moron.
Agreed, using the same device for illegal and personal activity is dumb.
Then why haven’t we heard about all the criminals (pedophiles, terrorists,…) being caught by Microsoft surveillance? Because they don’t care about the crimes you do. Their tracking is for money making only.
If I were a criminal I would not bank on it - they might use it for blackmail, too - but for the most part they are not in danger.
The current federal government is pedophiles, they aren’t going to arrest themselves.
I switched to Linux Mint a long ass time ago. Micropenis can go fuck themselves.
Don’t be euphemistic. Shame them by their actual name. It’s Microsoft. Microsoft makes software that is dangerous to its end users. SAY IT.
I’d also endorse calling them Microslop, half because their software seems to be rapidly ensloppifying and half because it pisses off their CEO
The mysticism of many cultures throughout history has assigned a power to knowing, saying and writing a demon’s true name. The earliest example of this I can think of is from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the obscure god Medjed, “The Smiter” whose physical appearance can’t be known so when he’s depicted in heiroglyphs, he’s drawn as a bedsheet ghost with eyes and feet..
Call evil by its true name.
I know that concept, but I believe it is more about unambiguity and transparency: I know who and what you are. There is no disguise or deflection to hide behind.
In that vein, I also believe that there is power in intentionally corrupted mockeries of those names, so long as those twists preserve clear lineage to their originals and are somewhat apt to the creature being described. They not only identify their subject, but also taunt it, essentially boasting the power that the subject has no recourse to your mockery.
“Micropenis” is a generic schoolyard insult that could just as well mean a certain president or a buddy you’re looking to tease.
“Microsoft” is the true name.
“Microslop” is clearly related to that name, so you know who I’m talking about, while also calling out the sloppy character of their work and taunting its executives who object to describing the digital offal they peddle as the slop it is.Motion passes 👩🏻⚖️ microslop it is. I’m adjusting my autocorrect library to match this new convention
I should note that there is no need to use either term exclusively. I think both have their uses and places, depending on the formality of the occasion or the context, and obviously anyone is free to use whichever they see fit to.
Just don’t use Micropenis. That’s juvenile, generic, hardly applicable to a company and liable to cause collateral damage: People born with a small member don’t deserve being equated to a company that, by all accounts, is being a giant dick.
Agreed. In this house we support and cherish genitals of all configurations so long as they aren’t themselves attached to giant dicks.
Voldesoft, get 'em Harry!
BTW
Ctrl-f NSAKEY (sees nothing) — it seems the internet has forgotten the NSAKEY debacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Identifier. Not tracker. They’re not phoning home, thank god.
Ugh… How do you think they correlated the GDID to his social media?
His social was logged into with that identifier
and how do you think the social account was linked with said identifier?
Because that identifier is logged by the website when he logged in.
From the article:
Microsoft’s records showed that at that exact same minute, a Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page.
Why does Microsoft have a record that includes both the GDID and a web addresses? I am confused by this mechanism.
Because everything you do is tracked
Could be using Edge (Account syncing), or using Bing while signed in (Considering they were signing into private accounts while on the VPN, seems possible)
This seems the most likely… but still I want clarity on the mechanism. An identifying token defined in the registry is being sent over the wire. That mechanic is pretty substantial, and I’m surprised a bigger fuss hasn’t been made about that. This is pretty far beyond conventional header fingerprinting.
From other articles I’ve seen (Here’s an example) it was telemetry and cross referencing the IPs used.
VPNs might help hide from passive identification, but they don’t help when you connect to the same service on your normal and private connections alternatively. The computer equivalent of using both your real name and an alias with the same person, they’ll know who you are.
It mentions this GDID is sent in telemetry. So this guy kept using a hosted proxy, meaning his egress IP was always changing accessing different services, but everytime his Windows 11 machine was sending back telemetry (which included his GDID) they were logging the IP address he was appearing from (the proxy) - so they were able to track and identify him.
If you use your Microsoft account to login, they have to be able to identify you somehow when you try to authenticate. It is basic usage. Not Telemetry. That is what caught him.
It is truly god damn unfortunate that Microsoft has spent decades fostering a level of technical ineptitude among the average person that they cannot even consider getting off their fucking shit ass platform that “just works”. Because that is the real problem. So many people on here will say “just use Linux!” But the vast majority of people cannot fathom where to even start with that and won’t even consider it because Windows “just works” and it has done so for so long that people just can’t be bothered.
The average user was incompetent WAY before Microsoft ever entered the scene.
Knowing anything about computers is a lot more niche than you think.
Windows “just works”
Honestly, I cannot understand, who can tolerate Windows 11. It does not even work! Constant bugs, eats memory like a hog, have to uninstall programs when updates itself (so constantly), because automatic re-installs. Every time you reboot, you have to kill several unnecessary background processes it automatically starts, or everything works even more like in tar. On my Surface Pro (Microslop made! Their own product!) the task bar never worked properly, every time there was an update to fix something, something else stopped working. Even the damn desktop broke few times, with random updates. It is a vibe coded piece of garbage.
I have everything I cannot switch to Linux, on Windows 10 - at least that still works. Windows 11 cannot even fill that bare minimum.
I have to use windows for work and its painful.
It does the opposite of just working.
It’s easier than ever to use Linux these days and Lemmy certainly doesn’t lack for penguin faithful that’ll proselytize and condemn you to computer-hell if you don’t adopt their religion.
But the “”“problem”“” is that Windows works okay for the vast majority of users. Most of the annoying parts of W11 can be changed or disabled within the OS itself, without needing special tools or knowledge. And I think that the vast majority of users don’t even care enough to do that. We use stock W11 at work and while the “new” style right menus and shit are annoying, they still function fine.
Windows likely won’t lose serious market share until prebuilt PCs come with Linux instead of Windows installed. Especially the non-gaming prebuilts.
He’ so stupid for sending ransomware and logging into snapchat/facebook from the same laptop without even using VMs
arguably more stupid for using windows and assuming there was any level of privacy
uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (…) or virtual machine
Oh. Even VMs.
What do I need to change in a VM so that this GDID also changes?
Yeah GDID works the same in a VM as it does on hardware. It’s actually easier to see in action on a VM:
- Create a Windows desktop VM
- Copy the VM
- Create a Window server VM and promote it to being an AD Domain in a new forest
- Try to join both copied VMs to the AD Domain. You can’t join the second one because the GDID is the same, and you’ll literally have to do a reset to get a new GDID for your VM
This was the most annoying part of messing with AD in college was running through the windows setup repeatedly because that’s the only way to get more than one client VM for your virtual Windows network
Create a Window server VM and promote it to being an AD Domain in a new forest4.Try to join both copied VMs to the AD Domai
LOL I am very, very far away from knowing how to do such extremely windowsy things.
