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The point would be so you could identify an individual computer and upon investigation tie it definitively to an owner. As it stands you can easily change a MA
by pmorici 14y ago
The point would be so you could identify an individual computer and upon investigation tie it definitively to an owner. As it stands you can easily change a MAC address and the translation of private -> public IP address done by a NAT capable network device combines the traffic of multiple computers to look like it is a single one. This means you can only attribute file sharing activity to a public ip which in practice might have numerous clients behind it.
Hence if there were a law like that and everyone obeyed it then you could generally identify the exact machine that did the file sharing.
- jiggy2011 14y agoYou will only usually only know the MAC address of the last hop since a new layer 2 frame is generated every time a packet hits a switch or router. For example if I watch the source MAC address of incoming HTTP requests to my server it always reports the MAC address as being the one for the router/firewall in front of the server even though the source IP addresses will vary. The only way I can think this would be possible to achieve would be to require a signed certificate and HMAC (message authentication code) from the the originating client to be sent with every IP packet and make sharing private keys a serious criminal offence. Even then it would probably be basically unenforceable on any kind of scale.