Coca-Cola Reserves a Massive Range of MAC Addresses

An anonymous reader writes "GNU MacChanger's developer has found by chance that The Coca-Cola company got a range of MAC addresses allocated at the OUI, the IEEE Registration Authority in charge of managing the MAC addresses spectrum. What would Coca-Cola want around 16 million MAC addresses reserved? What are they planning to use them for? Could this part of a strategy around the Internet-of-things concept?"

Comments

Not cans

[Shatrat]

Vertically integrated vending machines?

Re:Not cans

[gstoddart]

Or, security/privacy problems waiting to as the vending machines are integrated with a ridiculous amount of things (and with zero consideration for security).

Think social media campaigns and other things which want you to "check-in" with your phone at the soda machine.

And I'm sure the ones I'm seeing with credit-card readers are all super secure too.

Re:Not cans

[Anonymous Coward]

Then put your dollar bills into the machine and never worry. Banks pay for credit card breaches, not consumers. You may argue that we do so indirectly with higher fees, but not really. Fraud is a few billion dollars, but the fees they collect cover that without hassle. And since the swipe fees are money they collect at no actual cost--there's no product to produce, no actual expenses per transaction (merely a distribution of the fixed costs of maintaining the network)--they just don't worry about fraud. When you make money from air, losses aren't terribly bad.

I've had my credit card number stolen a couple times. As long as the thieves only get your number and not your actual identity (and the card info is all they will get from breach at a POS), it's merely inconvenient. The biggest hassles are setting up all the automatic payments again and learning a new number. I have a couple cards and if I'm somewhere I worry about the system's integrity, I use the card that doesn't have any autopayments associated with it. Then if it does get stolen, there's absolutely no hassle outside of a two phone calls to the issuer: one to report it, and one to activate the new card.

The bank doesn't care about losses, so I'm not terribly worried about it either. Of course, users of debit cards have a LOT more hassle, but that is their choice to use that financial product. If they learn to trust themselves use credit cards responsibly and pay off the bill each month, then they can enjoy these same benefits.

Re:Not cans

[CohibaVancouver]

Then put your dollar bills into the machine and never worry.

[rant]

For Christ's sake USA, get rid of the dollar bill already. There's nothing more freaking frustrating that trying to feed *paper* money into a vending machine - Especially crumbled torn and dirty American singles. I don't know what on earth you print your nearly-monochrome money onto but man it sure doesn't survive well... Get some $1 and $2 coins into circulation and make your smallest paper bill a five.

[/rant]

Re:Not cans

[Bengie]

Where do you put $1 coins when at the strip club?

Re:Not cans

[Penguinisto]

Banks pay for credit card breaches, not consumers

Like any other business, you, the consumer, eventually do pay for them - in higher (and newer, more devious) fees, lower savings/CD interest rates, and higher loan interest rates.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that you;re getting a free ride.

Re:Not cans

[fnj]

I can easily put 500$ in bills in my wallet

Sigh. In ones and twos? I thought not. Complete red herring.

Re:Not cans

[NatasRevol]

Every time I travel.

ATM only gives out $20. Some ticket/food/item only costs $2-3, I get 17 $1 coins jingling around in my pocket.

You get rather paranoid if you're out walking around.

Does Coca Cola own their own vending machines?

[barlevg]

If you figure there's one Coke vending machine per 100 people, that's 3 million Coke machines in the US alone. So certainly the scale (if we extend to worldwide) is about right.

"Massive range"?

[sootman]

"The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme. This 48-bit address space contains potentially 2^48 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

2^48 / 2^24 = 2^24 so OMG NOES they're getting one-sixteen-millionth of the available space!

If 16 million other companies do this we're TOTALLY SCREWED!

(Unless I did my math wrong or there are other things I'm unaware of, which is totally possible. I'm sure someone who actually knows about networking will either correct me, or confirm that this is a total non-story. If they wanted 16M IPv4 addresses this would be a little different.)

One block is not a massive range

[Shimbo]

So, Coca-Cola went and spent $665 dollars for a single block. This is not news.

Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone is being clueless- it's not a massive range, it's the smallest range you can reserve.

If you're a large enough corp and it doesn't cost much, you might as well reserve a block for yourself.

I don't see mac addresses going away anytime soon, and since they are given out in blocks of 16 million and there are "only" 16 million blocks one day coca cola's block of 16 million might become handy even if they don't use it now.