GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN

This article, and most articles about this, doesn't explain where FBI got that GDID from. Ok, Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place, and then try to bind that to a person.

I found another article that explains the process a bit better:

> Stokes got caught because he used the same Windows device for everything, and the GDID stitched all of it back together after the fact.

> Scattered Spider members phoned the jewelry retailer’s IT help desk from Google Voice numbers, posed as locked out employees, and talked support staff into resetting three accounts, two with administrator privileges. From there they installed a tunneling tool called ngrok to get past the retailer’s network defenses, moved roughly 77 gigabytes of data to Amazon cloud storage using ngrok [...]

> Investigators later subpoenaed ngrok and found the account used in the attack had been created on May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC from a VPN proxy IP address run by Tzulo, a hosting provider. The IP was a dead end. VPN proxies do that. But the GDID is built different.

> Microsoft’s records showed that at that exact same minute, a Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page. Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account. It gave the FBI a device, that don’t rotate the way VPN exit nodes do.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disa...

Although this doesn't explain where Microsoft got that traffic data from. How do Microsoft know which sites a computer visit?

It does make me wonder if people would react differently if Linux or Apple did the same thing.

https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-na...

"Oh look, this one has almost all the serial numbers of components and attached-devices as that other one, it's probably the same computer with a fresh install, let's make a note of that..."

As I grow older, I simply do not have the patience or the will to do all these workarounds and tweaks to my OS to turn it from a piece of barely-working corporate spyware into something that I can call a productive tool.

It also seems like interacting with the OS is on its way out anyway, as most people essentially interact with computers via the browser (essentially a different sandboxed OS altogether), whether on desktop or mobile device.

Microsoft is a post-privacy corporation. Eventually, we really have to stop acting so shocked about this sort of thing from them.

That's sounds nice and all, but everything about it, from "Nothing is theoretical" to "evidence, tagged by confidence level" goes out the window when you find claude as one of the commit authors, and the content is clearly copy pasted output from claude with very little editing. Worse yet, one of the sources he cites is also clearly AI output.

I'm not even against the use of AI here. I would rather see it clearly say either "this is what claude found after I told it to investigate" or "yes this is generated by claude, but I independently verified each of the points myself".

when LTSC exists why are people using W11 ?

But do any popular linux distributions use an identifier? Ubuntu, Kali, Mint, Arch, etc?

It seems an attractive way for devs to work out telemetry. Awful in reality; but I imagine attractive.

[1] https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/google-forced-to-de...