niallyoung on Nostr: David Nixon: Back to the MAC (Part 2): The Signal in the Noise "I had heard from one ...
David Nixon: Back to the MAC (Part 2): The Signal in the Noise
"I had heard from one of my regular meeting attendees that the MAC addresses with a packet interval of 2000ms belonged to people. … So I filtered for those. Then I recalculated entropy. And suddenly, the noise dropped away.
Among the filtered results, three MAC addresses stood out immediately. All three shared not only an entropy score of exactly 2.754, but also an identical broadcast interval of 2000ms — and that’s where it gets strange. When I overlaid their bitfields, something impossible happened: Bits 2 through 6 in Byte 1 formed a rotating 5-bit field. In MAC #1, the value was 24 (11000). In MAC #2, it rotated cleanly to 7 (00111). In MAC #3, it landed on 10 (01010). That’s not drift. That’s sequencing. Each of the five bits flipped twice across the three addresses — no randomness, no entropy drift, no byte overflow. It’s as if the system was stepping through a page index — mechanically, predictably, and in perfect sync.”
https://davidnixon.substack.com/p/back-to-the-mac-part-2-the-signal
"I had heard from one of my regular meeting attendees that the MAC addresses with a packet interval of 2000ms belonged to people. … So I filtered for those. Then I recalculated entropy. And suddenly, the noise dropped away.
Among the filtered results, three MAC addresses stood out immediately. All three shared not only an entropy score of exactly 2.754, but also an identical broadcast interval of 2000ms — and that’s where it gets strange. When I overlaid their bitfields, something impossible happened: Bits 2 through 6 in Byte 1 formed a rotating 5-bit field. In MAC #1, the value was 24 (11000). In MAC #2, it rotated cleanly to 7 (00111). In MAC #3, it landed on 10 (01010). That’s not drift. That’s sequencing. Each of the five bits flipped twice across the three addresses — no randomness, no entropy drift, no byte overflow. It’s as if the system was stepping through a page index — mechanically, predictably, and in perfect sync.”
https://davidnixon.substack.com/p/back-to-the-mac-part-2-the-signal