Unity: We have to charge for every install because we only see totals. Also Unity: We can tell which install is which, so you won’t be overcharged.
The whole thing seems rushed because the CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, was the leading advocate of microtransactions when he was at EA, and now he is instilling the same culture at Unity.
How will they differentiate between pirated copies and legitimate copies? How will they distinguish first-time installs from repeat installs? Can we trust their algorithm? It just doesn’t seem possible.
Unity: Everyone really seems to hate EA
Also Unity: Let’s hire the CEO of EA
🤦
I’m not sure why they hired him.
“Hey we’re looking for a new captain, why don’t we go for the guy who repeatedly sails into rocks? He’ll be good.”
Unfortunately a story as old as Wall Street. CEOs designed and hired to kill companies are a thing.
Meaning that this is on purpose? If so, who would profit from this? (besides the incompetent CEO themselves)
You can usually tell a unique machine apart from another via MAC address, but even that has issues, and that’s giving Unity the benefit of the doubt when they haven’t earned it.
MAC addresses are per network Interface, my computer has three technically and uses two of them on a regular basis.
A terrible tracking method.
MAC addresses are absolutely trivial to spoof, to the point that it’s just a drop-down option on linux lmao, so yeah good luck with that one
Are MAC address even shared ocer IP? as I understand MAC is for routers and other equipment to connect themselves, what MAC address are they going to receive? The one of the PC or the one of my router?
Except iOS will randomize its mac adress at each boot / after a while to prevent users being tracked by rogue WiFi networks, which is actually a thing being used to track consumers in commercial spaces etc. So that wouldn’t work.
I think this is rather about checking the MAC “from the inside”, as a program running on the computer. This will work on a PC, as I think neither Windows or Linux systems restrict reading the MAC addresses of network interfaces and such, by default at least. On phones, I don’t know. But the point is that now the “attacker” is not on the wifi network you want to connect to, but inside your computer, and wifi mac randomization is worthless. Not just that they might have access to the original MAC of the wifi interface, what about the MAC of other interfaces like the cellular data interface or ethernet (over USB, when its supported), and then theres tons of other info too by which they can identify the device.
There is still a lot of questions. How many components can I change and it still be the same computer and not a new computer? If I replace one component every two months after about a year I’ll have a new computer I’ve kind of ship of Theseused may way to a new rig. At what point would I have to buy a new licence?
If I don’t ever have to buy a new licence in that scenario why do I have to buy a new licence if I buy a new computer outright, it’s functionally the same difference.
The MAC address is the address of the network card, which can be either built into the motherboard, or on a replaceable card… so if that was the only thing they tracked, you could replace everything except that… unless you have a network card with an editable MAC (they don’t need to be unique worldwide, only on the network they directly connect to).
Microsoft seems to use a slightly different system, where they’d generate a sort of hash for all the components, then allow a limited number of changes per year, so you can change the while computer a limited number of times a year… but they call home all the time.
