Fedora 40 Looks To Utilize WiFi MAC Address Randomization For Better Privacy

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 40 Looks To Utilize WiFi MAC Address Randomization For Better Privacy

Among the newly-proposed features for Fedora 40 is enabling WiFi MAC address randomization by default to yield better user privacy...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/F40-WiFi-MAC-Randomization

[npwx]

Given that basically any paid access (Hotels, Airports, ...) uses the MAC address for whitelisting devices, that might cause some annoyances. Given how chatty some services like mdns are, I also question whether this really results in increase privacy.

[Turbine]

I'm already battling with this in the server space. What a shit idea.

[SpyroRyder]

Given that basically any paid access (Hotels, Airports, ...) uses the MAC address for whitelisting devices, that might cause some annoyances.

The good thing is you can disable it, seemingly on both systemwide and for a specific network. The downside is that i dont know if there is a GUI control for it. If not its not like thatd be that hard to put in, you just need the Gnome design team to agree that its a necessary option 😂
Not sure how much faith i have in that as Alan Day wanted to remove a lot of the network settings relatively recently.

[aviallon]

The good thing is you can disable it, seemingly on both systemwide and for a specific network. The downside is that i dont know if there is a GUI control for it. If not its not like thatd be that hard to put in, you just need the Gnome design team to agree that its a necessary option 😂
Not sure how much faith i have in that as Alan Day wanted to remove a lot of the network settings relatively recently.

They want to remove a lot of the network settings? What would they remove? And why?

[avis]

That's a good idea, but I hope the random MAC option will provide a random but static address because lots of public paid wi-fi hotspots authorize you by MAC address and if it changes on every connect, you're in a lot of trouble: either you'll have to enter your credentials every time or you'll lose access forever (since your first connect attempt will be the allowed MAC address).

BTW that's exactly how Android works.

[SpyroRyder]

They want to remove a lot of the network settings? What would they remove? And why?

Alan got knocked back by pretty nuch everyone so worry not. Heres the discussion, its basically closed though so no need to comment and stir shit up again.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2252

You can almost see what hes going for but if there is one block of settings where you need the advanced to be available for everyone its network stuff

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Alan got knocked back by pretty nuch everyone so worry not. Heres the discussion, its basically closed though so no need to comment and stir shit up again.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2252

You can almost see what hes going for but if there is one block of settings where you need the advanced to be available for everyone its network stuff

Jebus. It's terrifying when product development people automatically jump to "let's just wack half the functionality" and screw many of our users rather than solving a human resourcing issue. The correct answer appears to be "convince RH/IBM to hire one engineer to maintain this part of the code".

[npwx]

Jebus. It's terrifying when product development people automatically jump to "let's just wack half the functionality" and screw many of our users rather than solving a human resourcing issue. The correct answer appears to be "convince RH/IBM to hire one engineer to maintain this part of the code".

How hard can it be to maintain a handful of knobs and input boxes?

[direc85]

I think this should be opt-in instead of opt-out... It's only going to cause confusion for the users that don't know about its existence, and fill up the lease tables for networks with months-long DHCP leases.