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Where to start.
Shoddy craftsmanship. Highly illogical. Dumb all over (and maybe a little ugly on the side).
After using PINE http://www.washington.edu/pine/ for a couple of years I was confronted with OE on someone's computer somewhere. It was like a kick to the balls. Now get of my lawn : ).

http://www.nthelp.com/50/Outlook_error_codes.htm

If you can't do it in device properties in the Device Manager:

Win2k/XP: http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm

May not be possible in all cases in Vista/7...but you can give it a try:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/697bf48c-a226-4315-8875-2bbeddf16db2

One thing, though, he could have mentioned - various IP spoofing methods. Imagine you are on a DHCP network (on campus, for example.) You ask for an IP and you will get it, and this will be logged: "00:f0:3e:45:33:66, authorized as belonging to John Doe, asked for an IP and got 10.0.15.213 for 6 hours". Nice. However what if you want to misrepresent yourself? An enterprising student can use ping and arp (if not some better tools) to find out what IP and MAC addresses are online, and once some of those computers go to class (or to sleep, for example,) take over the MAC address and ask for a new DHCP lease ... done, and you have a new shiny IP address, perfectly logged as belonging to John Doe whereas you are someone else entirely.

This would clearly demonstrate that the DHCP has no authentication beyond the MAC address, and that can be easily changed on many cards. Any judge, however technically illiterate, can understand that if you can get any identity by just asking then it's pointless to hold the identity owner responsible.

This text, as seen here, would be relevant in the expert's refutation:

Unfortunately it's the very simplicity of DHCP that's actually the problem as far as security goes. No authentication or authorization takes place during an exchange between a DHCP server and DCHP client, so the server has no way of knowing if the client requesting the address is a legitimate client on the network, and the client has no way of knowing if the server that assigned the address is a legitimate DHCP server. The possibility of rogue clients and servers on your network can create all kinds of problems.

15 Q. Does a MAC address tell you if a
16 device is wired or wireless?
17 A. If you can see the MAC address of the
18 transmitting device you could see whether that
19 device was wired or wireless.

The MAC address can be changed in Windows as well, which is probably not such a bad idea all things considered. If you want any privacy these days you have to secure it for yourself because nobody else cares anymore and some are actively trying to subvert it.

I agree it's a pain sometimes to go to people's houses to fix things, but if you turn it in to a career... it's great. I keep updated versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, MozBackup, AVG, Spybot, Ad-Aware, SpywareBlaser, HiJackThis, KillBox, AIMFix, CWShredder, SmitRemove, Google Earth (or just GooglePack installer these days), Adobe, iTunes, Symcln (can't f'n' stand when Norton products can't even uninstall properly!), and finally the best Matrix screensaver I know of - http://www.nthelp.com/matrix.htm - and I think that's it. Of course there's some funny videos, pictures of cops that have gotten their car stuck (http://www.edlippjr.com/pictures/funny/popo-crash -02.JPG), and the like. No p0rn on the thumbdrive. :)

The answer is probably that it just isn't as it seems. Even using some big numbers and assumptions, its not as bad as it seems. If the site sends 10 million users 50 MB of data each and spreads it out over a whole day, it comes to about 5.5 GBps continuously. Taking a look at this map, there are plenty of cities that offer that kind of bandwidth, and this is only one network (admittedly, the largest), and of course, the servers could (and almost certainly are) spread out over several locations. Further, the number of servers required is not great considering it is not unreasonable for a high end server to achieve 100's of MBps when serving static data like this. Of course, all these numbers are probably pretty far off (in reality, I'm sure the number of servers required scales terribly as you start to spend a lot of resources on load balancing and the fact that some sites serve huge libraries of content), but my point is that it is certainly reasonable.

That said, you do still bring up an interesting issue: even though these sites are certainly technically feasible, they are certainly extremely expensive (Go ask Worldcom how much they'd like to buy all of there connections to Los Angeles...). Unless we are reentering dot com days, Google, YouTube and there ilk must be expecting to make some serious ROI soon.

http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/
http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm

HPFS = pinball

All Hail OS/2!

That's somewhat correct. The MAC address is burned into the hardware, and you really can't actually change it. This being said, the OS does read it, and many OS's allow you to simulate the change in software. This doesn't actually change the address, as if you put the card in another computer, it will revert to the actual MAC (unless that OS is also configured to simulate a MAC change).

How to change your MAC in Windows 2000/XP

Also, part of the MAC (The first half, I believe) tells which manufacturer made the equipment. You can look up the manufacturer for a specific MAC here.

Even Windows supports it, the mac address used can be over ridden in the registry.

Of course you can change your MAC address.

In general, people don't know they can change it or they are not technical enough to do it, so they (the Wireless ISP) can charge after the first hour for 99% of the population. But you can be in the 1%... :D

Here is the instructions for Linux:
http://whoozoo.co.uk/mac-spoof-linux.htm

And since you probably use Windows:
http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm

You can find similar instructions for OS X online as well, I'm sure.

Now you might ask, how to automate this on an hourly basis? In linux it would be simple with a cron job. In Windows uhh no clue, but there might be a way.

It's not even hardwired into the card, so you can just tell the card to change it's MAC and it will.

Here's how to do it on windows.

In Linux its just as easy:
ifconfig interface hw ether 23:23:23:23:23:23

DRM is scary because, if it's done right, you wouldn't be able to turn it off. It's a much more serious effort than serial numbers and MAC addresses.