[unwind]

One silly thing that I hadn't thought of; the use of NTP for devices like this should mean that the NTP operators can gather pretty accurate statistics about each device's market share.

I guess the same folks who design software that spams things like this don't bother working too much on making it hard to fingerprint their devices, either. On the other hand, I haven't looked at the NTP protocol recently. Perhaps this isn't even possible due to the protocol's simplicity?

[gcb0]

dns is a better target for this. Google even had rob pikes team do this sinkhole for them. which says its an expensive and worth goal and not some afterthought.