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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Changing the “id” like the MAC address or the IMEI has no impact on any system.

    On the system none, yeah. But if you pick an IMEI that’s also used by an other phone, that is what can cause trouble, as I know. It’s the same as when multiple devices have the same MAC or IP address on the same network.

    For example, when a client device gets its IP from the dhcp server on a router, which allocates a random ip from a specific pool, it does not influence anything like ip packets routing…

    That’s because it is not random. The DHCP server keeps track of the addresses it has assigned to someone, and will never tell the next new client to use an IP it has already assigned someone.
    But if you set your IP statically and pick an IP that is used, or if you run multiple DHCP severs for the same network without coordination, then problems will come.
















  • Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

    For programs, that is not a problem.
    This is a problem for data.

    Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

    If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
    And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

    Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
    But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.



  • Nothing is hidden, it’s all there

    Yeah, of course, it’s all there in binary. For programs of course that’s not a problem, but for data that you may need to look at any time, it is. It’s harder to interpret both for humans (significantly) and both for any program that want to make use of it (unless they use the specific library that came up with the format, and by that also pulling in all its libs transitively)

    Binary data is not much less obfuscated than the system files of windows. It’s all there, you can read it