> That's what doesn't make sense. If the UUID is unique to the install, then > it doesn't tell you anything. If it is somehow unique to the hardware, It tells you a lot at the statistical level if you have machines calling in multiple times. If its a one off process never repeated on updates it tells you no more than a simple "hello" message. > then that mapping needs to be made transparent as that reveals other > information (probably cpu and disk serial numbers and nic mac addresses) > about the users hardware. If you wanted to go that way a cryptographic hash is the usual approach. Its trivial to turn the data into the hash, collisions are improbable but its almost impossible to reverse the hash into anything.
