Wifi networks collect a reference to your computer (called MAC address) when you login. That way, when you try to login again, even with different credentials, they detect that it is the same device…
Wifi networks collect a reference to your computer (called MAC address) when you login. That way, when you try to login again, even with different credentials, they detect that it is the same device and do not allow you to continue using it.
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By classichasclass 2025-06-2115:3712 reply Alternatively, if you don't want to run the whole Electron app, the money is this line:
sudo.exec("/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport en0 -z && ifconfig en0 ether `openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'`",200 bytes for the business logic.
47MB for the UI & boilerplate around the business logic.
I get that this may be the easiest way to develop and publish an application today, but it's sad that this is the direction we have taken in recent years.
Modern app bloat in one analogy:
Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes
Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000
Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound.
Then the whole app would weigh: 1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds
What weighs ~2.35 million pounds?
TOTAL: ~2,304,000 lbs- A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - A blue whale: ~330,000 lbsThe business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top.
Just to run 20 bytes of logic.
On a related note: Transporting a human in a car is (in relation to weight and size) like using a standard shopping cart to transport two 1L bottles of water. So the next time you walk through a pedestrian area, imagine everyone carrying a bag would use a shopping cart instead. That would be a huge traffic jam -- exactly like what you see on the road!
I've been pretty aware of this ever since I became a cyclist. I will ride down to the corner store to pick up a six pack and some chips, throw them in a backpack and ride back. It's easy. I see people driving their cars to do the same thing. All that weight and space for a 6 bottles of beer. There is massive waste all around us.
By spiritplumber 2025-06-229:092 reply A long time ago in San Antonio TX I was pulled over by the cops while biking back to my little apartment with a bunch of groceries. They were unwilling to believe that an adult would leave the car home to get groceries by bicycle.
(I'm from Italy originally).
By linker3000 2025-06-2220:08 Context: We're from the UK.
My wife and I left a meeting in a business park in Phoenix and decided to walk the 5 mins to the local shopping mall, have a look around and then get a taxi back to the apartment in which we were staying (We'd taken a taxi to the meeting).
We were about 2 minutes into our walk when a car pulled up and it was one of the people from the meeting. People in the office had spotted us walking and assumed there was some kind of emergency or our car had broken down.
We had to be very politely insistent that we didn't need a lift to the mall and were perfectly fine.
By bjelkeman-again 2025-06-2213:00 We experienced the same when we walked down the hill to go shopping in Laguna Niguel, CA. Stopped by cops for walking to the store. Nothing more happened.
There is also the time component. Off peak and with a decent sized backpack (change of clothes, laptop, food etc) it takes me the same time to go 6km as it does to drive it.
At peak it’s 1/4 to 1/3rd the time.
Cars are slow around town.
By Zambyte 2025-06-2213:32 The time component has to factor in both the traffic while driving, and the extra time required to find available parking. I bought an electric scooter a few weeks ago, and I have come to realize that my travel time is pretty much purely a function of distance. I just roll up past traffic if there is any, lock up on any bolted down object, do my business, unlock, and roll out.
If anything, I feel like traveling at rush hour is actually strictly better for me. Cars being slow doesn't slow me down, but with the average speed being so much lower during rush hour, it seems like it makes it so if a driver hits me, it would be at a lower speed.
By tengwar2 2025-06-2121:54 It's a reasonable solution, but let's not forget that simply walking is often at least as good a solution in many countries.
By ornornor 2025-06-226:32 Getting a trailer (burley cargo in this case, but applies more generally) has been a game changer. I can even bike to ikea and bring back flat packed furniture with it. Or do the weekly groceries. The trailer can carry up to 100lbs iirc (I have an e-bike)
Short errands are much nicer with a bike: less effort than walking, much faster than walking, no parking headache at destination, cool breeze in your hair, and free (no gas, insurance, parking, tickets…)
By bongodongobob 2025-06-2120:231 reply Those people could be driving from 20 minutes away or on their way home from work, or running other errands or picking kids up from school or any number of things. Good for you though.
By bongodongobob 2025-06-231:26 Not where I live. Not where a lot of people live.
By sheepscreek 2025-06-2119:362 reply I like your username, and what happened to WD-41?
By sheepscreek 2025-06-2121:372 reply What was the question?
By redundantly 2025-06-220:23 They're still working on that.
By sheepscreek 2025-06-224:13 Haha - but of course!
By d-lisp 2025-06-2120:06 Incrementation ?
By BobbyTables2 2025-06-2120:39 Excellent point!
And to top it off, the dual flights and whale would need complex orchestration too!
We just call it Kubernetes…
Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo, and it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside vs a smaller airplane… you’d probably do it! There’s no incentive in software to get a smaller, more efficient plane, and plenty of incentive to use the big thing for free that has all the extra features
> it has nearly no environmental downside and has no meaningful downside
I think this is not the case. E.g., we replace our computers every few years, but not because the new ones can do things that you can't do with your current computer. It's because the software you use to do the same things keeps getting more resource-hungry.
By iknowstuff 2025-06-2119:591 reply Its called externalized cost and its as real in software as it is IRL
So the cost is there, it's just not paid (directly) by the developer. But we all end up paying someone else's externalized cost, included said developer that is paying some other developers' externalized costs.
By josephg 2025-06-220:49 Yeah. I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post doing the math on that. If I spend $2000 on a computer, and that gets me a certain amount of ram and cpu and so on, we can figure out a dollar figure on that bloat.
Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software.
Consider also the missed market opportunity: my personal devices are 13yo laptop and 9yo phone. If an app isn’t compatible or makes it lag, I delete it and download a competing one. I’m not alone, and yes: I have money to spend on your app. I just don’t want/need to upgrade hardware that often.
By GTP 2025-06-238:53 Kudos for keeping your devices for so long, I also try to have mine last as long as it's practical, but so far i didn't manage to have them last so long. Unfortunately, you're in a minority. Most people would change their phone once the apps they're using aren't compatible with it anymore. So devs don't consider this aspect much.
Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode.
The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.
By HappMacDonald 2025-06-2215:591 reply Or they could just send the video uncompressed and then it would take even less hardware resources to decode on the client side. Why, in a sense it would be a lot more like decoding analog television signals at that point. (Not least of which since few clients would have the network bandwidth to handle more than 360-480p of that ;)
By antonkochubey 2025-06-2222:10 VP9 is not more bandwidth efficient than H.264. You’re thinking of AV1 here, which is only encoded by YouTube for VERY popular videos.
That analogy doesn’t really work here. Because there is a downside. It’s slow, takes up a ton of memory, lots of disk space…
When you have so many processes on a modern machine competing for resources, when every app chooses to be bloated and slow it really adds up.
It doesn't "take up a ton of memory" and if you think 47MB is "a lot of disk space" then maybe you need a bigger disk. Most laptops have at least 250GB, so this program would take up about 0.0188% of disk space, which is frankly not a lot. I had PDF files way larger than that. And you only need to run it once, you do not need to keep it loaded and running all the time, so it doesn't "take up a ton of memory".
This is how we have ended up with huge cars and huge houses etc. Storing huge volumes of unneeded junk isn’t solved by have more space. Store less junk.
By leptons 2025-06-2121:53 You can live however you want to live. I will live however I want to. 47MB is not worth worrying about, at all.
By BobbyTables2 2025-06-2120:462 reply 47MB is about 3x the space once required by a widely used commercial graphical operating system. It was even enough to also include Microsoft Word with plenty of space left.
How far we’ve fallen.
You're living in the past. Hard drives are now up to 36TB. Hard drives are always getting bigger. 47MB isn't worth worrying about, at all.
This is such a weird rationalization. You’d sell a kidney to be a 10x developer but making an app 1000000x smaller isn’t worth a thought? Maybe that’s why the former hasn’t happened.
By leptons 2025-06-2218:39 Where the hell do you get me saying I would sell a kidney? What are you smoking?? Weird? Your comment is the only weird thing here.
By superb_dev 2025-06-224:32 Yup and those 36TB are cheap and common! Right?
While it is true that hard drives have large amount of storage, it is unlikely that are any Mac with a 36TB hard drive attached that needs to overcome WiFi time limit.
By leptons 2025-06-2218:40 Doesn't matter what size hard drive is in the mac. If you can't spare 47MB to solve a problem you're having with wifi access then you are doing it wrong.
By charcircuit 2025-06-221:29 47 MiB only costs $0.0002. What has fallen is storage price.
By anonymars 2025-06-2120:27 These crappy WiFi portals are known for having ample download speeds too, right?
That is more a tragedy of the commons thing. For each individual app the comparison holds true
By IgorPartola 2025-06-2119:30 And since we do have app stores as gate keepers, this could easily be remedied by the app stores. They wouldn’t even have to penalize you. Just put a score on there for app size (and app responsiveness) compared to the median in that category. Put this near the star rating from the reviews. Executives don’t generally care that you as an engineer want to reduce an app size by 10% but they really really care about how the app looks on the app stores because that’s what they show to people and what they are judged on.
By kulahan 2025-06-2119:22 Tragedy of the commons or just a really bad industry?
By BobbyTables2 2025-06-2120:441 reply People usually think that but when it comes to attack surface, change management, upgrade issues, etc —- the extra stuff isn’t entirely free…
Upgrades shouldn’t ever break things, bugs and vulnerabilities never exist, and Rube-Goldberg machines should work 100% reliably day in and day out.
Unfortunately reality doesn’t work that way…
By al_borland 2025-06-229:47 Even Rube Goldberg sometimes included a simple alternative at the end of his machines. If the opossum or woodpecker get sick, there is a knife handy to sharpen the pencil.
By lostlogin 2025-06-2119:44 > Well, if you COULD ship something across the world on a private 747 with extra features to protect your cargo
Qatar might even give you a plane!
By numpad0 2025-06-225:47 This has to be Soviet Shoe Factory Principle in action, not just ignored negative externalities. Everyone relies on shipping more code for their employment, rather than more values, which incentivizes that behavior.
By phyzome 2025-06-227:52 I think you're conflating "no incentive" (which might be true) with "no downsides" (which is not).
By m3047 2025-06-2216:29 Very nice. Maybe that should be submitted to The Register for their units of measurement menagerie.
By shepherdjerred 2025-06-2120:391 reply How many 747's can the average person fit on the 128GB+ smartphone in their pocket?
By rajnathani 2025-06-2310:43 The commenter messed up on mentioning that a flash drive can be 1 pound, this would be more so the weight of a hard drive.
By Eric_WVGG 2025-06-2216:54 bravo, Douglas Adams would have been proud
By jofla_net 2025-06-2118:40 says more about sociology, really.
By foxglacier 2025-06-2121:481 reply Human time is money in software, more analogous to mass in physical goods. So you should calculate the time savings for all the people using the app vs entering the code themselves.
Mass is a nonsense analogy that doesn't reveal anything useful.
The proposition that Electron apps are somehow "saving time" is preposterous!
Of course, the real cost-saving is in labour—web development presents a radically lower barrier to entry compared to even non-native, cross-platform UI/UX platforms such as Qt, or Flutter, or what-have-you, let alone simply managing multiple native applications.
So this is not a bill-of-materials kind of analogy, it's a statement about talent.
Web leaders have grown complacent; at times, it seems they don't take things seriously. I mean, just take a look at something like SvelteKit. I'm not a web developer, however I happen to like Svelte a lot, but also despise SvelteKit equally as much.
Every major release is like "fuck you."
By _gruntled 2025-06-2221:40 “every major release” lol you mean the single major release that has ever happened since GA?
By fwip 2025-06-2221:05 Yes, the savings in labour translates to savings in time. This should be obvious.
Using Electron to package your application often saves time over writing a native app.
Giving a regular user a ready-to-use app saves them time, because they aren't googling "how to use terminal" for five minutes or trying to copy-paste the magic command out of their notepad app.
By paxcoder 2025-06-2118:30 While I appreciate criticizing bloat (why are we packing Chromium in every app again?), I would like to warn against watching every "pound". Images, for example, "weigh" a lot more than code but that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose and add value.
That being said, the fact that quick maths can give you a 6 orders of magnitude difference between functional code and the package is probably reason for concern.
By BestHackerOnHN 2025-06-225:09 OMG you win HackerNews today with this comment! Super HackerNews!!!
This is an absurd way to think of this. Following this same train of thoughts for humans:
The business logic for humans is a single reproductive cell.
A single sperm weighs 2.3 x 10^-11 grams. If the average male weighs 75kg the. The bloat ratio for a human male is 3.2x10^15
Getting back to the app there is huge value in not needing to run the command yourself. Sure it’s wrapped in a UI that comes with “bloat” but honestly who cares. When was the last time someone needed to worry about hard drive space, when it comes to a 40mb file.
By m11a 2025-06-2122:13 Well, the apps often come bundled with a bunch of other stuff. Automatic updates, background workers, telemetry …
All of which sucks up your compute resources and battery. Repeat for every such little utility app you have on your Mac. Some may implement that random stuff inefficiently (eg very frequent telemetry), which sucks even more. Some of it may even be wrong, vibe coded, or copy pasted.
Personally, puts me off installing random utility apps, even if the single utility would be useful.
By Dylan16807 2025-06-226:36 In the human analogy, the human has to be the entire computer too. It's all functional, not much bloat. For the app, the computer is external. It really is bloat.
By dbalatero 2025-06-2118:48 To be fair, the author didn't make this to impress people with byte optimizations, they probably just wanted to publish an app quickly that is useful, and was familiar enough with Electron or JS to do so.
It’s not the easiest way just the most evangelized. A Qt app even would be a few lines of code, but we’ve done a good job scaring people that learning other languages is bad because we can’t ship features fast enough with non-evangelized frameworks.
By righthand 2025-06-2120:49 Every framework under the sun gives you a `main()` func to call your program code. But if all you’ve ever used is blogs telling you how to hack together an electron app, you’d probably assume electron was the gold standard for simplicity sake but in reality is the gold standard for Google’s sake (and whatever marketing company’s).
By PaulHoule 2025-06-2213:26 Yuck! Funny though I wrote a program for making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms using TkInter/Python. Stereograms work best when you can put important objects at the plane of the paper/screen and this is done by sliding the left and right images relative to each other.
Tk has no color management, unlike newer frameworks, which was good in this case because I asked for (255,0,0) and got (255,0,0). When I exported to JPEG and views on a web browser though I got something like (186, 16, 16) because on my wide gamut monitor the native primaries are more saturated than sRGB primaries so some white gets blended in to make them less saturated. Turns out in Windows, screenshots are in the color space of your monitor! It’s something you’d never notice unless you made stereograms because that little bit of green and blue goes to the wrong eye.
I so strongly wish more developers gave even a single shit about this. The current state of desktop app development is truly an embarrassment.
By LauraMedia 2025-06-2212:33 There is a deeper problem in this: The DX for native applications is too annoying, undocumented or hard for most people.
I tried to build some of my tools without Electron, it's always a battle of multiple documentations for multiple systems and creating a bespoke system or having to deal with UI documentations that are glorified API references without examples.
The last few tools I built used PhotinoNET, which gave me an electron-esque framework but not bundling it's own chromium, instead using the browser already on the system. And even that required a complicated build script so I can just export a simple flatpak, exe and dmg...
By malnourish 2025-06-227:251 reply Who is embarrassed? What are the realized harms?
Microsoft seems to have given up on guidance for how to write desktop apps, Windows 8 had that Metro thing that got rejected by the world. I guess you could use Win32, WinForms, WPF or something else. The incoherence is second only to the Linux world, I remember how developers were crazy about theming in Win32 in the ‘95 age so something like Back Orifice or the app for your scanner looks atrocious. WPF added really great support for theming but at the point everybody was burned out in theming so it hardly ever got used.
By chuckadams 2025-06-2221:471 reply Metro goes back to Windows XP Media Center, and frankly was one of the best UIs ever. Also used by the very underappreciated Zune (which was not helped by its drab hardware design or MS's PlayForSureWeMeanItThisTime DRM)
By PaulHoule 2025-06-2222:04 I had a $99 Windows tablet that I thought was a great value and totally easy to use, but, like every other tablet I've had, I mostly used it to browse the web. Zune was pretty good but the only program that deserves the name "It plays for sure" is VLC.
I keep thinking that this could be solved by just building Electron into the OS as a shared framework so we don't have to have a separate copy for every app, but the more I dig into it, the more I realize I'm just reinventing the web browser.
By thisislife2 2025-06-2118:56 There is something called the "WebView" in all the major platforms. The idea is that it allows you to use the browser engine only for creating the UI. But people complain its not "enough" because it is not the same on all the platform (it is if you use it just for UI), restricts access to some browser APIs (ignoring the fact that the OS often offers the same, even and more APIs) and Javascript (a crappy language for creating software applications).
You are describing PWAs, but they'll never have the same API access & permissions as a native app.
By mistercow 2025-06-2211:12 Yeah, and I think it’s worth asking why there. Why do we not just have a standard for PWAs with privileged OS access?
There are two obvious answers. The first is portability. And sure, but Electron provides an answer here, so why can’t we provide one with PWAs? We could even have OSes define this interface for different browsers to target in a standardized way. Yes, you need platform specific code, but that’s often the situation with Electron too.
The other answer is security. But how is Electron / any other installed app any better? Because we require more explicit consent before installing a “real” app than for installing a PWA? OK so, just let’s just do that for PWAs too.
By mixmastamyk 2025-06-2117:56 Tauri: https://tauri.app/
By runlaszlorun 2025-06-2215:04 Sadly this was also my reaction.
By kzrdude 2025-06-2123:57 And notice the other abstraction too.
This is not 'an app to change MAC address' but an app to 'overcome WiFi time limits'.
By PaulHoule 2025-06-2213:18 A few years back I did an eval of ways to make cross platform apps, specifically to escape Electron, and came to the conclusion that ‘they all suck’ except maybe JavaFX.
Thing is, most x-platform frameworks still require a big download. Java and Python runtimes are in the same ballpark as Electron.
Those who don't learn /usr/bin are destined to reinvent it, poorly.
What does this mean? I've always understood /usr/bin to be the storage dump for system binaries. Do you see or use it another way?
By GTP 2025-06-2119:27 They likely mean that you already have in there all what is needed to change your laptop WiFi card's MAC address, without needing an additional application.
By sli 2025-06-2218:02 It just seems to me like far less work to just write a real binary that execs this static command than it does to setup a whole Electron project.
By ncr100 2025-06-221:00 Cough, AI Training Models, Cough
There's great power in abstraction. Disagree?
Your point is that an operating system, and its shell, all running on a machine, and a collection of apps, are somehow smaller than a wrapper application.
I'm curious the amount of bytes the entire stack, minus the chrome which is the complaint I believe, how many bytes that is. I would say probably a gig.
Yes but you need a space station OS (Unix) to enjoy the terseness of 47-200 bytes of business logic.
ps: I love both space stations and Unix
The solution to this problem requires you to interact with the OS, so a solution that requires tools found in the OS itself isn't a bad one. Its so simple you can have a script triggered by a desktop shortcut and be done with it.
That all said, a simple GUI API provided by the OS for simple programs like this would be nice, just to give the user better feedback on the process. Is it done? Is it doing anything? Did it run correctly? Etc.. Zenity on linux kinda does that but is not guaranteed to be installed...
By kjkjadksj 2025-06-2216:54 Why do you need that in gui when you already have it in cli through pid?
By yjftsjthsd-h 2025-06-2123:18 I guess, but the OS is a fixed cost that you already have
By runlaszlorun 2025-06-2214:59 And sadly my reaction to 47MB these days is "hey not bad" given that I see 6 or 700 MB apps not doing much .
By CommenterPerson 2025-06-2118:001 reply Are they doing something additional with the 47MB - 200 bytes? Like selling you to the brokers?
By WJW 2025-06-2118:35 Not even. It's just overhead.
Why does a Mac-only app that shows a menu bar icon and a notification popup need to be Electron…? That’s 30 lines of Swift, max.
If you don't know Swift, but do know Electron, it's easier to do it in 30 lines of Javascript.
People who don't like the developers work can always write and publish their own application, of course.
It's hard work writing free stuff for others, much easier to criticise stuff instead of getting your hands dirty.
By pwdisswordfishz 2025-06-228:202 reply It's hard work learning programming tools and optimizing, much easier to use a one-size-fits all framework that wastes the end-user's resources.
By chipsrafferty 2025-06-2222:13 What's the incentive to spend a lot of time to optimize for something you're giving away for free?
By nsonha 2025-06-2223:31 It's NOT intelectually challenging. Software engineers love to learn new things, but they do not love 10 different syntaxes for displaying stuff. Figure it out.
By steviedotboston 2025-06-2222:04 I just asked ChatGPT to write a Swift program to renew MAC addresses with a menu bar icon and it had no problem with it. Just over 50 lines.
Looks like ai-generated bloat. It even has deps for deb+rpm builds yet is mac only.
Honestly would not expect anything more from js devs who use macs/windows. I see this so often.
If you want a frontend for you app, you probably just use Electron and get it over with in a few minutes instead of digging through the docs for Qt or some other framework.
Is it worth it? Probably not, since this is a single-platform app to start with, but JS+HTML are easy to theme and customize, and Qt is... not quite as simple.
Where did you get Qt from? This is, again, a Mac-only app that doesn’t even have any windows. It’s just a menu bar icon and a notification. That’s incredibly simple to build with plain old Cocoa and Swift.
By righthand 2025-06-2117:44 No one has to dig through electron docs though right? There is nothing simple about an electron app regardless how little logic you personally programmed on top of it.
By juancroldan 2025-06-2117:082 reply Now that you can build such an app with AI in under 20 minutes with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control, I don't think that's a good excuse anymore
If you don't know the language, how can you properly understand and control it?
By therein 2025-06-2117:40 In 2025 you unfortunately just vibe with the code nowadays.
By paxys 2025-06-2117:16 > with a manageable codebase you can properly understand and control
Yeah, that definitely describes every AI codebase I have seen..
By outofpaper 2025-06-2116:15 People forget to think about Swift let alone tools like Platypus.
By thisislife2 2025-06-2119:011 reply It doesn't need to be - on macOS, it could even just as well have been a simple Xbar Plug-In! ( https://xbarapp.com/ ).
By rafram 2025-06-2119:46 Or Alfred script, Raycast plugin, Shortcuts shortcut, shell alias, and the list goes on. There are a lot of decent options; "50+ MB Electron app" is, in my opinion, not one.
Electron is an overkill way to not have to learn how to do stuff properly, if you ask me. And people love not to learn.
No a PR that actually makes the world a better place. Be the change you want to see and all that.
By pwdisswordfishz 2025-06-228:17 By deleting the repo and banning the person from GitHub?
By ajsnigrutin 2025-06-2115:551 reply 1) the dev only had a hammer and he nailed the screw in
2) the dev has 64gigs of ram and a newest CPU and doesn't care about performance issues for people on older computers... that's why you need gigs of ram just to read a weather report online.
By gopher_space 2025-06-2119:532 reply Is ActionScript still a thing on Macs? I feel like that tech was almost criminally overlooked while being the backbone for a lot of processing pipelines back in the day.
It (AppleScript) is, and you can actually write JS instead these days, with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge (JXA).
By al_borland 2025-06-2210:01 I was preparing for the death of AppleScript and was shocked when I stumbled around their addition of JS a few years back. I thought that would have been big enough news to hit my radar when it happened, or that Apple would have made a big deal about it at WWDC. Of course, that would require them to fully support AppleScript in their newer apps, while instead they seem to really only care about Shortcuts, since that’s easier to sell on mobile, I assume.
By latexr 2025-06-221:43 > with a criminally underdocumented Objective-C bridge
The documentation is the Objective-C docs, I use those all the time. You do need to understand the basics of how to translate from the Objective-C APIs to what JXA (or AppleScript) expects, but once it clicks you can do it for essentially anything with the same logic.
By gopher_space 2025-06-2121:37 Ahh thanks! Went down a brief rabbit hole with JXA and had forgotten how opaque Apple is when you're developing for them.
By mattl 2025-06-2120:08 You mean AppleScript?
By encom 2025-06-2116:51 Because that's all anyone knows, and PC development is dead.
>content-length: 47262814
Sigh...
By CamperBob2 2025-06-2119:071 reply I mean, these days, you ask an LLM and it spits out code that will, for something this simple, probably work the first time.
By CamperBob2 2025-06-2120:572 reply Whatever. I'm not the one who used 47 MB to distribute a single line of code.
By CamperBob2 2025-06-220:08 This isn't about me. Let's not make it about me.
By greyface- 2025-06-224:31 This will generate a multicast MAC 50% of the time, which will usually work, but can theoretically cause problems if there's a multicast-aware Ethernet bridge in your path. Ideally, the LSB of the first octet should be fixed to 0 to indicate a unicast address.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address#Unicast_vs._multic...
Nice, added it as a bash alias.
alias randommac='sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport en0 -z && sudo ifconfig en0 ether $(openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/../&:/g; s/:$//")'By commandersaki 2025-06-2118:392 reply So I tried this out on macOS 26 and the `airport` command is no longer there.
There is a `airportd.sb` file, which appears to be some permissions based thing in s-expression/LISP. Weird.
Edit: Spun up a macOS 15 VM and I got this:
WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.
I guess they weren't kidding.
By bc569a80a344f9c 2025-06-2119:252 reply Looking around briefly, you can replace it with this:
`networksetup -setairportpower en0 on && [... set MAC ...] && networksetup -setairportpower en0 off`
I think it's pretty safe to assume that modern Macs will always have en0 as the WiFi adapter, but if you wanted, you could use `networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder` to find the associated device.
Modern Macs do not always have en0 as the WiFi adapter (it's en1 on current iMacs and on the Mac Studio; en0 is the ethernet jack).
But you're unlikely to be taking one of the machines that has built-in ethernet to the airport or coffeeshop.
By bc569a80a344f9c 2025-06-2120:26 Duh, also true on my Mac Mini. But yeah, “modern Mac laptops” probably makes the statement correct enough and still describes the entire set of targets.
By commandersaki 2025-06-227:02 So this doesn't work if your wifi nic is associated with an SSID. `airport -z` disassociates the SSID.
Can't seem to find a CLI command to do the same in macOS 26, but I haven't looked too hard either.
By msdrigg 2025-06-2119:57 Airport has been deprecated for a year or two. Here's an article talking about its deprecation and its relatively nonfunctional replacement: wdutil https://www.intuitibits.com/2024/03/14/goodbye-airport/
By Alifatisk 2025-06-2115:55 I feel like using Electron for such a little thing is way overkill. The newer laptops are very powerful so I don't think anyone would have any performance issues, but on older macbooks, having too many little Electron apps running in the background makes the fan go brrrrrrrr
By virtualritz 2025-06-2117:35 And you could ask an LLM to whip up the Swift code or whatever to wrap this line into a Dock app etc., if you want that convenience.
What exactly is that doing? Is there some backend limitation for WiFi interfaces that making it think it’s Ethernet is faster?
It just resets the MAC address, making the router believe it's a new device, thus not subject to the "x minute" free WiFi.
That won't circumvent the sms code requirement most free wifi services use.
By catlifeonmars 2025-06-2117:084 reply I have never seen this before
I've only seen it once.
I was doing some work in a small-ish county jail/sheriff's office in the States. As part of that work, I needed some Internet access.
Because jail (thick, reinforced walls and lots of steel) the cell phone coverage was basically shit -- otherwise I'd have just used my phone like I would normally have done approximately anywhere else.
It was a fun dance: Requesting access via wifi, getting sent a code via SMS, and then going outside, turning off wifi to establish an actually-working network connection, retrieving the code (yay Google Voice), and then going back inside, turning on wifi, entering the code, and actually using it.
There was some other detail (perhaps relating to very short timeouts or re-registration issues or MAC randomization) at some stage of the operation that seemed extra-insulting, but my mind has forgotten whatever it was.
I have no idea what this song and dance was intended to provide, prevent, or enforce.
By fc417fc802 2025-06-221:28 > I have no idea what this song and dance was intended to provide, prevent, or enforce.
Describes far more corporate IT policy than it ought to.
By rafram 2025-06-2119:43 It's required by law in some countries, and it leads to some very funny chicken-and-egg situations with airport WiFi.
Istanbul Airport added a workaround: a physical passport scanner that stores your info and generates a code as an alternative to SMS verification. The whole thing just feels like a VPN ad.
By dizhn 2025-06-2118:44 There's at least one country with laws that say you have to keep track of national ID numbers (and times) if you want to provide wifi service.
By popularonion 2025-06-2118:341 reply Never seen it in the US, but it was fairly common when I was on vacation in Europe
By lavezzi 2025-06-2216:13 Maybe you haven't flown recently then, even T-Mobile has introduced message based verification for trying to use their free in-flight WiFi now.
I think they are extremely rare, and I would rather just use my mobile data instead of giving them my phone number.
Definitely does not happen on "free trials" on in-flight Wi-Fi for obvious reasons.
By dizhn 2025-06-2119:43 A now deleted comment reminded me that this is mostly for in-flight wifi where it makes much more sense. Mostly no SMS there either.
By rixed 2025-06-225:53 Or the voucher obtained by scanning your boarding pass in some airports.
By chipsrafferty 2025-06-2222:161 reply I've never seen "x minute free wifi". What countries is that common in?
By sodality2 2025-06-230:47 I’ve seen it at a few places in the US, typically somewhere they have a paid unlimited/fast plan but a free tier for a limited time to be able to say they offer “free wifi”. So places it costs money to offer wifi. Maybe a flight, cruise, etc
By nine_k 2025-06-2218:26 Fine, Electron is a complete overkill for that.
What would you use instead to build a macOS GUI program with comparable ease? SwiftUI? Python + Tk (using the ancient system Python)? Something like Red?
By cozzyd 2025-06-2117:42 the hilarious thing is it shells out for the random mac...
By MattSayar 2025-06-223:29 The best part is right after the money line: 'Please check ' + issues_url + ' for help.' where issues_url is a github.com link. How are you going to check GitHub if you can't connect to WiFi in the first place?
Wow. Don't you need to pay a Apple license as well to distribute apps in Macs?
By tengwar2 2025-06-2121:59 Not for Mac. MacOS is an open garden: there is an app store; or you can install signed apps (requires Apple cooperation); or you can install unsigned applications. MacOS gives you a nudge to the app store (which has genuine advantages) and a much stronger nudge away from unsigned non-app-store apps, but it is still an open garden. iOS is closed garden, which makes some sense for the security guarantees it can give for financial applications.
By preciousoo 2025-06-220:281 reply Is this possible on mobile (read iPhone) devices without root?
By scarface_74 2025-06-2213:16 Settings -> WiFi -> choose your WiFi network -> private WiFi address -> set to “rotating”
It will change every time you disconnect/connect
Glad this feature is built into most modern operating systems these days.
For MacOS (Sequoia+) you can just forget the network and reconnect to get a new MAC address [1].
Android's documentation for if it decides to generate a new address per connection is a little vague [2], but I'm guessing forgetting and reconnecting works as well, you may also need to flip the "Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization" bit in developer settings.
On Windows, flipping the "Random hardware address" switch seems to cause it to generate a new seed/address for me.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-euro/102509
[2] https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/wifi-mac-random...
By lxgr 2025-06-2117:51 Per [1], this only works once per 24 hours on new iOS/macOS versions, and only once per two weeks on older ones though.
Yeah I had to flip the developer setting toggle, but worked flawlessly for my flight (American Airlines has a watch an ad for 20 minutes of free internet that only works once per MAC)
By fendale 2025-06-2119:59 Are you saying that on IOS 18 if you enable developer mode then each time you forgot the network it gets a new Mac? But without developer mode it does not get a new Mac each time you forget it? The Apple docs linked elsewhere in this thread suggest it only gets a new Mac once per 24 hours when you forget the network normally. I’m going on a long boat trip in the next week where this trick might work for me if so!
By userbinator 2025-06-223:53 I have a generic Android phone from many years ago where the manufacturer didn't even bother to program the WiFi NVRAM, so every time you load and unload the driver, you get a new randomly generated MAC address. Interesting that that has become a feature these days.
By bapak 2025-06-2116:37 I think the rotating address is limited to 3, right? The script here generates one at random.
By purplehat_ 2025-06-2117:221 reply Here's an equivalent little script for Debian Linux (but should work on most distros), based on classhasclass's comment:
You should replace `wlan0` with whatever you see in `ip link show` for your wireless interface, for me it is `wlp0s20f3`. I replaced the `openssl rand` command because it was generating some invalid MACs; this is hopefully only valid ones.NEW_MAC=$(printf '02:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x\n' $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256))) sudo ip link set wlan0 down sudo ip link set wlan0 address "$NEW_MAC" sudo ip link set wlan0 upBy righthand 2025-06-2117:46 KDE Plasma has a “Random” button next to the MAC address field in the Network Manager UI. I’m on Debian Testing so not sure when it was added.
