On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 12:49:08PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote: > On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 11:33:57AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote: > >> Huh? What's the concern? All you are submitting is a list of > >> hardware devices in your system. That's hardly anything sensitive.... > > > > We actually had a very vocal minority about all of that which ended up > > putting us in the unfortunate position of generating a random UUID instead > > of using a hardware UUID from hal :-/ > > Tinfoil hat responses indeed! Ok, if those folks are really that > crazy, my suggestion then would be to do a "ifconfig -a > /dev/random" > before generating the UUID, and/or waiting until you just about to > send the first profile, and/or if you don't yet have a UUID, > generating it at that very moment. The first will mix in the MAC > address into the random pool, which will help guarantee uniqueness, > and waiting until just before you send the result will mean it is much > more likely that the random pool will have collected some entropy from > user I/O, thus making the random UUID not only unique, but also > unpredictable.
It might be better for us to just improve the pool initialization. That'll improve the out of the box experience for everyone. -- Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
