It’s not like any of these are phoning home (I hope), or married together, so there’s nothing to kill clones.
It will be an amazing video, but good luck if the device in question has (very likely):
* a mask-ROM / OTP-ROM for a serial number - almost all microcontrollers and EEPROMs sold nowadays has at least one permanent and unchangable UUID for hardware tracking and DRM implementation (security-through-obscurity tricks to prevent rogue competitors from copying your firmware).
* "firmware read-protection" - which means the only way to dump the EEPROM is performing a full-chip erase and destroy the entire firmware, commonly used in embedded systems to stop rogue competitors from copying your firmware.
In many cases, this isn't for anything user-facing. Unique ID chips can be very useful for detecting factory-overrun counterfeits ("oh, your $widget does this notable, nonfunctional behavior? Where did you purchase it, perchance?").
Firmware is largely closed-source, so all you can do is hope.
When purchased, it had an IMEI of all zeroes, and came with a step by step guide to setting the IMEI from my old phone into it.
Apparently that works around phone providers who blacklist or whitelist certain manufacturers.
It's an awesome Chinese $50 android phone.
Because it hasn't passed all the network tests, most mobile networks would block an entirely random IMEI, so they suggest you type in the IMEI from your old phone (as long as it's 4g - if it isn't, they have a support email address you can contact and they'll give you an IMEI that works in your country)
Even the legit Umidigi A3 Pro's (which cost $80, and have proper certifications) have an 'imei change' tool.
Let's not forget every single page printed by a color printer.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
BTW, how does Windows hash your hardware serial numbers for DRM nowadays? I haven't used and checked it for a long time. Is it still the harddrive and the motherboard?
Don't run spyware on purpose.
Couldn't that be ... any software?
Meanwhile, nobody has ever said anything about the serial numbers of hard drives, GPUs, motherboards, RAM modules, Ethernet MAC address, etc, etc, etc. Nowadays, basically everything comes with one UUID.
Pretty illogical, isn't it?
> We've long lost the war on privacy.
Agree. I understand UUID is important in engineering for many purposes, but the fact that nobody is talking about it anymore (because they are nothing when compared to more severe issues like fingerprinting) indicates we've long lost the war on privacy.