Who cares?
drwho
They said straight up, "I googled you and couldn't find a Twitter or Facebook account. What are you hiding?" I had to teach them who Armand Jean du Plessis was.
Opting out of social media these days is considered inherently suspicious. It definitely came up the last time I had to undergo a background check for work.
There are two models I've used for this over the years, the Linksys EA8300 and the WRT 1900AC. Here's how I did it both times (though I only got around to writing up my notes the second time.
Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.
I don't agree with them sending more than the first half either.
Not that the local DHCP servers falling over has anything to do with it...
A MAC address isn't really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn't; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.
What do you mean, custom firmware? Are you trying to boot a different distro of Linux?
When you have the USB drive plugged in, how are you booting up? What's the process you're using?
The first three octets of a MAC specify the manufacturer of a NIC chipset. That could come in handy for driver debugging.
Manufacturers and firmware versions of storage devices? You can make the argument; perhaps it would have helped figure out the SSD firmware bugs years ago.
But stuff like whether or not you have video capture card or your current system temperature stats? Nah.. that's getting into "identifiable information as toxic waste" territory.
Low hundreds of billions?
They sure make the task of keeping an eye on the chuds easier. Their OPSEC eats donkey ass.
'till all are one. o7