Register of stolen items?

I was looking on a well known auction site to see if there were any bargains.

One piece caught my eye but not for good reasons.

A full size component with no box, no power lead and no interconnects. And if you were being uncharitable, some damage to the casing that suggested it had been forcible removed from someone’s rack.

Which made me wonder, does Naim have a register of serial numbers for items that have been stolen? Has anyone told them when they’ve had anything taken.

You can check a serial number with Naim. IIRC they used to log any items reported as stolen.

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I usually check the serial number just to see service history etc. They are always very helpful

Good to know they keep such a list

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Back in the day the factory used to send a list of stolen items to their dealers. Back then of course they made fewer items and had fewer dealers, and the lists were presumably sent in the post or by fax. I wonder if a central list is still kept. Maybe @Naim.Marketing knows.

Tbh adding a list to this, the main Naim site or indeed any website would be so trivial that it’d be surprising if it didn’t exist one way or another, to allow a ready look-up of items reported as stolen.

I’ve always wondered how easy it would be to trace/recover stolen internet connected devices.

Each piece of kit has a Mac address. Is it possible to ping??? the Mac address and discover the IP address. From the IP address discover the physical address.

Not possible to ping a device unless you know its ip address, which usually is issued locally. Dependent on device ( most network suppliers have mac addresses registered) you could try a dns look up. Most domestic stuff is unlikely to be registered though.

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How about Naim obtaininng Mac addresses and router IP addresses during firmware update?

MAC addresses are used within a network segment, e.g. on an Ethernet segment. They are layer-2 addresses in the frame header. The layer-2 frame encapsulates the layer-3 IP packet. The layer-2 frame is stripped off at a layer-2/3 boundary (e.g. a router). I.e. not routed to or visible from beyond the router

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Thanks. That’s cleared everything up. :grinning:

Very conceptually, a network packet looks like this:

Each box is essentially an agreed-upon definition like “byte 1 means this, byte 2 means that”. A simple repeater on the Ethernet repeats everything, higher-level boundaries will strip off things. E.g. the “Ethernet” box is left out if the router transits the packet between two different networks, like between your local Ethernet LAN and the Internet

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I think that starts getting into data privacy water pretty quickly.

Albeit they did it without consent, back in 2010 it was that sort of activity that landed Google in trouble.

The UK ICO, GDPR, CCPA (Californian data protection law) all consider IP addresses as personal information (PI). So Naim would have to go through all the processes that implies if they started gathering it, even if they could obtain your router’s public IP from your device somehow.

[edited to add: I’d be happy to opt into a scheme that allowed Naim to track my UQ1 in the event of its theft, but I’m fairly sure whatever they came up with would need such consent, and I wasn’t suggesting you were in any way implying this was anything other than a neat way to deter criminals/repatriate stolen goods :slight_smile: ]

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You could with IPV6. Providers are implementing this IP version now. With IPV6 every device has its own unique IP adress,derived from its Mac adress.
No more need for routers. As for privacy…hmmmm…:thinking:

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While true, there are IPv6 privacy extensions and the option of dynamic assignment of changing address prefixes. Will depend on local laws, most likely. In Germany, the IPv6 Council has recommended legislation requiring that ISPs do that.

And routers are still necessary. Even though each device has a global IPv6 address (apart from the above), these addresses will still live in different networks and routers have to route traffic been them. Though they will have it easier in some ways

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Might be another use-case for blockchain: ‘proof of origin’ for the naim boxes ….

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@gthack @SneakyPete
I’m not 100% certain about this, but I seem to recall, when I loaded the the naim app onto my phone to control my QB Mk1, before it would work I had to agree that Naim could track my location. Which I assumed would be done via my IP address.

But I could be wrong.

That might be to allow leveraging of something like GeoIP2 - a db that allows location of a (request) source IP to country. I could image, for digital rights issues, that Naim might need to know which country you live in. Strictly that purpose should be made clear to you (likely in all the Ts&Cs none of us read;) ) I’m really guessing why they need it though, or how they track.

Sat here listening to The Killers, on vinyl, no way anyone knows where I am! They’ll never take me alive! Though responding on here probably does, if anyone is really determined :wink:

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No that was different. What you were asked to agree to was the app accessing Location Services and the reason for that was that at the time Apple included in that permission the scanning of the local WiFi network. So if you didn’t accept Location Services then the app couldn’t discover the streamers.

At the time Naim confirmed that they didn’t have any need to know where the device running the app was, nor did they access GPS data.

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