SpaceMagic said:
I can't possibly think of a moral let alone legal reason why you'd need to fake your MAC address. Please enlighten us...
Actually, some wonderful person posted how to do it using terminal. I have seen the articles on doing it for Safari, but it can be done for all network communication.
Likely teen porn fantasies or other nefarious activities. Don't do it, once you down load the key for Barneys Typing Tutor you'll down load SpongeBob Paint, then games like Pong. Don't do it, its a slippery path. Oh, no.. Do you want pirate copies of Vivaldi and Bach? The eBible... For shame.
The only legitimate reasons are to test network security and this second weird idea. Spoofing can be used as a key for security. Go with me on this. It's easy to lock a access out for anybody with out a particular Mac address, but this still allows all users who have authorized Mac addresses access to the network if they have all other keys necessary. So a poor mans way of limiting band width can be to only allow those that can spoof Mac addresses. Two computers attempting to access network bandwidth (if allowed) causes access to become unstable. Think about sifting through multi-colored sand for just the color you want. Boom crash. Let's say I have a home wireless network and I want to limit access to 3 computers at a time, but I don't have much control over who gets what access- room mates. Let's say these people are sociable, but not social- i.e. pleasant goths. So to keep everybody happy, I can do one of 2 things. I can assign each user a single Mac address, so that they can choose what machine they want to have access, but only one at a time, or I can arbitrary create 3 a small number of Mac Addresses and post them. If they are all taken, and somebody attempts to gain access... it's a crash for just two computers.
I know it's odd, but it's a sound idea. I doubt anybody would go through this to limit bandwidth though.
Edit: I am awair of software that is there to allow for packet sifting, but really it's a lot of trouble, especially if both computers are requesting wireless data.
