FYI, I have personally witnessed multiple instances of duplicate GUIDs.
By your description, any two dialup users who install at the same time will have identical GUIDs. The severity of this effect depends on granularity of the timestamp used.
While dial-up does not play any role in GUID computation, the absence of an Ethernet card does. My guess is that most AOL users have no Ethernet card installed in their computer.
I know of a company that uses GUIDs in their client software--it is recorded, by default, in their server transaction logs. I also believe that some companies may use it for client-based authentication.
The GUID is not a unique identifier. It is based on the MAC address, which requires an Ethernet card. If the originating computer does not have an Ethernet card, DUPLICATE GUIDs are CREATED!!
The ZDNet story reports that the GUID has traced back to an AOL user--however most users on AOL access the Internet via modems, and have no Ethernet card! (It suprises me that this caveat is not mentioned in the ZDNet article.) The GUID is likely identical to many other dial-up users.
Also, since GUIDs are based on MAC address, GUIDs are tied to a specific computer (or more correctly, a specific Ethernet card)--not a specific user. This creates an interesting twist in a computer lab environment.
And even then, MAC addresses can be faked. Or, if the GUID is stored in (I'm guessing) the Windows Registry, it's even easier to change.
For these reasons, GUIDs are meaningless. It is a poorly designed user tracking mechanism that doesn't work. The only reason one should fear GUIDs is that they may be used as evidence which may lead to false prosecution by the ignorant.
---BTW, the GUID is not Microsoft application specific. GUIDs are available as part of Microsoft's API's, and are used in many non-Microsoft applications. Look around a little and you'll see.
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Here's how I run my backups of several gigs. /dev/tape is a 20GB DLT, although when compressed, I'll load 180GB of web logs, easy.
tar cvzf - filelist | dd of=/dev/tape bs=1000k
FYI, I have personally witnessed multiple instances of duplicate GUIDs.
By your description, any two dialup users who install at the same time will have identical GUIDs. The severity of this effect depends on granularity of the timestamp used.
While dial-up does not play any role in GUID computation, the absence of an Ethernet card does. My guess is that most AOL users have no Ethernet card installed in their computer.
I know of a company that uses GUIDs in their client software--it is recorded, by default, in their server transaction logs. I also believe that some companies may use it for client-based authentication.
The ZDNet story reports that the GUID has traced back to an AOL user--however most users on AOL access the Internet via modems, and have no Ethernet card! (It suprises me that this caveat is not mentioned in the ZDNet article.) The GUID is likely identical to many other dial-up users.
Also, since GUIDs are based on MAC address, GUIDs are tied to a specific computer (or more correctly, a specific Ethernet card)--not a specific user. This creates an interesting twist in a computer lab environment.
And even then, MAC addresses can be faked. Or, if the GUID is stored in (I'm guessing) the Windows Registry, it's even easier to change.
For these reasons, GUIDs are meaningless. It is a poorly designed user tracking mechanism that doesn't work. The only reason one should fear GUIDs is that they may be used as evidence which may lead to false prosecution by the ignorant.
---BTW, the GUID is not Microsoft application specific. GUIDs are available as part of Microsoft's API's, and are used in many non-Microsoft applications. Look around a little and you'll see.