[kclay]

The Mac address part stood out to me, has something changed over the year that made changing Mac addresses more complex?

Back in college our school had some limitations on the internal networks in our dorms. After doing my normal stuff (you know mega downloading,ftp, limewire etc) my net stopped working. Come to find out they had a bandwidth monitor and would just block you for some time if you used too much and had to contact tech support, even for simple things like window updates.

Anyways, somehow I found out I could tweak some net configs in the registry. So here I randomly change some dword value to change my Mac address. I finally got back online and just forgot about it.

A few days later I came back to my room after classes, my roommate told me the school officers raided the room trying to get on my PC. I went to the student dean's office and come to find out I took net access from I think the president and they tracked it to my PC ... Some luck I say lol .. Tech support said that there was no possible way I could change my Mac address after a bit back and forth I decided to just agree with him.

O yeah and they had like a 200-300 page printout of irc chatlogs ,there was more stuff but I'll end it there.

Needless to say my net access was blocked for a year even tho I had a work study job with the webdev department. It didn't stop me though, I ended up running a long cat5 cable from the dorm next door. Fun times.

[crote]

Network cards have a factory-configured MAC address, which is the default one the adapter will use. As you figured out, the operating system is usually able to override this MAC address- but it has to redo this every time it initializes the adapter. It'll still have its original MAC on a different system.

However, in the article they did not have control over the operating system. So how do you change the MAC address then? Well, you change the factory-configured MAC built into the device - which requires using the factory configuration tool!

[chmod775]

> has something changed over the year that made changing Mac addresses more complex?

It just depends on what the driver/hardware lets you do. Some drivers don't support changing it and some hardware/firmware may just be built in a way that doesn't make changing it (easily) possible. Not being able to change it may be more of a WiFi thing though. I've had the displeasure of dealing with one of those cards. Not sure if it was just the driver.

The Linux Kernel driver for Intel Ethernet supports changing the MAC address, so there's an example of what that may look like: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.19/source/drivers/net/et...

That's already at the driver level though. There's a couple dozen other manufacturers with drivers in the Linux kernel, and their cards may work entirely differently.

If however your hardware allows you to have sufficiently low level access, your MAC address can be whatever you want it to be. After all, if your device says "this is my MAC address", then that is its MAC address as far as anyone talking to it is concerned.

If your card is a black box and is doing all the work internally (I think that'd be most cards?), then you're at the mercy of what it lets you do.

At the other end of the spectrum you'd have programmable NICs/"FGPA with an Ethernet port".

[o_____________o]

Small shoutout to https://github.com/halo/LinkLiar

> This is an intuitive macOS status menu application written in Swift to help you spoof the MAC addresses of your Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces.

[Ductapemaster]

Ha! We did the same thing on our campus to get around the bandwidth blocks. We had an internal file-sharing network (DC++) which wasn't restricted in any way since it was all internal traffic. In fact the server was run by one of the network admins...go figure. But, content has to come from somewhere outside the network, so I just kept a rotating list of about 20 randomly-generated MAC addresses to keep the pipe open at full speed. I mentioned I was doing this to a friend in the IT department at some point, and he said the university knew about the trick and that I should be careful, but nothing ever came of it.

In reality, the real rate-limit was my college budget and the price of hard drives, but it was all good fun.