I’ve been thinking of doing some OpenWRT tutorial videos for YouTube so I looked at what some other people have done. More than afew examples had alot of information on screen blanked out such as public IP (somewhat understandable if static I guess) but they even decided to blur/redact random information like the MAC address of the LAN interface.
There’s like no reason to redact out MAC addresses right or basically any information that the Luci interface would show a user on a video? If so, what should be considered?
Thinking of it now maybe it would be cool to have a sort of “video friendly” theme/skin of OpenWRT in which things like IP/MAC are purposefully removed.
Some people want to protect their privacy, like a famous YouTuber talking about the chip industry.
A MAC ultimately is stored in the database of the manufacturer and while they don’t have your name if you bought it in a store, if you paid it via a card, the government would be able to make that connection. Now, if you assume your government plays by the rules, then indeed nobody would be able to make that connection (but perhaps the store would have a secret (illegal in western countries) cache of CCTV/MAC pairs), but you can’t know that. Additionally, when you have a friend over and he sees your MAC number, searches for it and finds that “Mystery YouTuber X” is actually you, you also lost your secret. So, if you do not publish the number in the first place (or if you have verified it to be random), you have eliminated that risk.
The LAN MAC may be very similar to/the same as the wan mac depending on the hardware arrangements I'm guessing, so might give away more than people want. UPDATE - I checked this on my Flint 2 and found that the MAC addresses for the lan (br-lan), wan and both wifi radios were an exact match except for a few characters.
As an absolute minimum I'd make sure to hide anything that shows external IPs and wifi SSIDs/MACs. I’m aware that some people can use these to locate you fairly accurately without too much trouble.
The other thing to consider is whether your videos will become hugely popular and then someone more sophisticated sees you as sport and tries to hunt you down to have a little play. One of the things red-teams always start with is OSINT, so anything you give out that might give away something valuable could be looked into. I'm a tad paranoid, so personally as well as hiding external IPs, and actually any IPv6 (mainly because I can never work out which ones are external), wifi SSIDs and their linked MACs; I'd also prefer to hide any client names that are anything less generic than the brand/model, and I likely wouldn't display much about the structure of my internal network. I don't know really how much of that is healthy paranoia, or what becomes tin-foil wearing, but I've suffered from confident complacency before and seen people get burnt.
I'm just guessing, but imagine the video friendly theme you suggest might be quite a lot of extra work for those who are already very busy. I'm guessing your suggestion is to have the #####'d out fields like for the wifi keys (I've not mentioned hiding these because I guess too obvious), that could be turned off/on as you see fit?
My suggestion to make it simpler is maybe use a tool like snagit, which makes scrolling captures easy, allows simple labelling, blur/pixelation and cut-outs which can be great for removing excess from your images. It's dead simple to work with and would go nice in a video.
I hope you do some good guidance videos though, great way of encouraging more people into using Openwrt. I really miss OneMarcFifty who did some incredibly clear and informative YouTube videos some time back. Well worth a watch for inspiration.