[vox-tech] Search Warrant Question re: GUID

[Kyle Ambroff]

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Bob Scofield <scofield at omsoft.com> wrote:
>
> I've been Googling "GUID," and I see that there are various uses of GUIDs.
> But it's not crystal clear to me how it works in child porn investigations.
> Does it mean that a person's Limewire program has a unique GUID, that is
> different from another copy of the Limewire program?  Or is it that the
> person's version of Windows has a unique GUID that is different from mine?
>
> Do Linux and open source programs have GUIDs, or is this just a Microsoft
> thing?

Yes, but they are usually called UUIDs (Universal Unique IDentifier).
As Alex pointed out, it's likely that Gnutella assigns a UUID for your
account or session or something like that. These values are random,
and designed to guarantee uniqueness. See RFC 4122 for details on how
they are supposed to be generated[1].

Your system should already have libuuid installed. There is also a
command line tool you can use to generate UUIDs in shell scripts (sudo
apt-get install uuid), as well as libraries for Perl and Python.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt