Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.

Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you’d also have to reboot to ensure it’s updated.

  • TwilightKiddy@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I’d guess it’s some standardized way to determine which OS the browser is running under? Like it does not report the specific Linux version in the user agent header, but it does say that it’s Linux and it’s architecture. I’d assume there is just some standardized library for it and for Linux the easiest way to know where the hell your binary got launched is /etc/os-release.