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After several more hours of research over the past few days, I've discovered that Android developers came up with the brilliant notion, starting somewhere version 5 or so, to run with randomized MAC addresses. The first three pairs of digits remain the same each time, but on each reboot or wi-fi restart, a random set of digits is generated for the last three pairs. While I appreciate their efforts to further protect my privacy, I'm profoundly distressed by the fact that I cannot use my tablet for work, as registration is required. In particular, I am running Android 6.0.1. Does anyone have any notion as to whether or not I can create a MAC address that will remain constant?
I'm trying now to contact somebody with the developers to find out if I can make it static, but so far the only responses I'm getting are wondering why I'm not in favor of it being random. I'm seriously considering scrapping the whole thing and moving completely away from Android if this is how things are done now.
Evidently it's how things are done with cheapo no-name tablet from Amazon. These things can often be fluky, buggy, flawed, and many other quality issues. If you had a Samsung Tab or smething else quality, it wouldn't be a problem.
That's not helpful Mike, and what do you base that statement on anyway?
Apparently it's a security feature introduced by Google into Android, to stop device tracking.
Do you know for sure that tablets produced by Samsung don't do exactly the same thing?
The failing here is that the device doesn't provide an option to turn off MAC address randomization, and stick with a static address.
This is quite notable for being really interesting and at the same time completely worthless. This definition for the word 'boondoggle' seems to be appropriate:You're right. What a stupid feature, and it doesn't work as intended anyway -
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomization/
The OP already indicated this is a Npole NT101 tablet, with a major fault in that its networking stack makes it unsuitable for use in a corporate or small business environment.If its a samung tablet theirs always an option to reflash the os and it will reflash the baseband as new
The OP already indicated this is a Npole NT101 tablet, with a major fault in that its networking stack makes it unsuitable for use in a corporate or small business environment.
I tend to agree, it's looking like a real uphill battle to get this tablet straightened out. If it was implemented as an opt-in/opt-out feature, having a rotating MAC address could be useful, but making it fixed is really short-sided. The decision to do this was obviously focusing only on one security aspect, while ignoring all the other issues involved with networking and connectivity.And unlikely to be fixed, given the response from them. Unfortunate but I think the OP will need to get another device.