> Legendarily it was HP (or was it sun?) who shipped a whole batch of ethernet cards accidentally in the 90s with the same MAC address, boy was that a nightmare

> Legendarily it was HP (or was it sun?) who shipped a whole batch of ethernet cards accidentally in the 90s with the same MAC address, boy was that a nightmare to figure out the hard way. Android has an API to query a unique device ID, which is generated from a field that's supposed to be populated with a serial number by the manufacturer. It is (or was previously) used to identify you as a particular user in some games, as well as for ad tracking and analytics. One line of phones (I forget which manufacturer) managed to NOT update that serial number correctly, and as a result the entire model of phone came up with the same "unique ID". This was not fun to debug, as lots of users were ending up with other users' saved games, and one particular "user" was showing up in analytics as having used dozens of apps thousands of times a day...