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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

I hope it still connects with the real MAC address. Otherwise that could get very problematic.

They could make it optional, but having such a technical option wouldn't be Apple's style. Perhaps it could generate a new random MAC address for each saved network, which would be thrown away when you use the 'Forget network' command.

That would probably solve most of the problems I was considering. But somehow I suspect implementing this may be more challenging than it appears.

Why is that? The only good use that comes to mind is MAC filtering, and that's easily defeated anyways.

DHCP with static (reserved) IP addresses comes to mind.

Yes, I do this at home because it resolves the problem of a duplicate IP addresses on the network caused by a device assuming it still has the same IP address (Apple devices seems to do this in particular) while meanwhile another one has taken it.

What? IME Apple devices are extremely polite about refusing/deactivating IP addresses that are already in use.

My experience is I get home, open my laptop, and it seems to by default assume it has the same IP as last time it was on my home network. Meanwhile my kid's 2DS game is using that IP, and I have a few minutes of chaos. I just assign fixed IPs to all the regularly connected devices and I don't encounter that.

Are you sure this isn't a router problem? A number of routers have an issue where they occasionally drop their table of DHCP allocations and just start again; this mostly only manifests when a new device connects.

You may have been lucky, but I'd suggest looking at http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do

There's been plenty of debate about whether this rapid DHCP behavior is desirable (e.g. Is the improvement in user experience worth the potential for conflicts and/or other issues on networks not expecting this?), but, either way, I don't see how that behavior can be fairly characterized as polite.

If you connected to a hotspot using a captive portal, you would need to sign in every time you disconnected and re-connected from the access point.

It might be easily defeated, but some places rely on it, and iOS users would be effectively locked out of those networks.

This is just for scanning, look at the slide that is mentioned. Connects will still use the real MAC address.

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