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There's a question on the site concerning tethering detection (on the part of mobile carriers). The accepted answer ranks highly for searches on this topic and is often cited on sites like reddit.

The section on detection via MAC address is blatantly wrong and suggests a misunderstanding of network fundamentals. Yes, at the physical layer there is a concept of a MAC address - but the phone will be doing NAT when tethering! Numerous comments have identified this issue. Ideally this entire paragraph needs removing or at least considerably revising.

Unfortunately the question is locked, and as I discovered in the chat, no edits can be made. I'm not debating the reasoning behind the question being locked - but it seems silly that it's still discoverable but cannot be corrected.

Is there any way the answer can be corrected?

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This appears in the main meta in relation to historical locked posts What to do when I want to improve a locked post? where the accepted answer says (in part)

So that is it. A locked post is locked, and will probably always remain what way (note that actively maintained posts shouldn't be locked, so this one wasn't maintained at least for some time). These posts will not be maintained any more, no matter how good your edit might have been

(Emphasis Supplied)

So it looks like there is nothing that can be done, unless there is a policy decision to reverse this

Coming to the discoverable but not editable (and votable) portion, it is by design - from What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?

Historically-locked questions are omitted from normal question lists (those on the home page, /questions, and the various per-tag lists), but can still be found by searching for words in the post or title (via either site-search or Google, etc). The visual appearance of the entire post is altered by removal of the voting arrows from the question and all answers.

Being discoverable has the unfortunate consequence of being misinterpreted / misquoted , and I am not sure how that can be addressed, if it needs to be ( given that incorrect information is plentiful on the Internet )

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    Seems there's not much that can be done, it's an unfortunate situation - xkcd.com/386 Guess it's not really specific to this particular SE site in any case, more of a global design feature/flaw. Thanks for your thoughts in any case – Adam Williams Jul 28 '17 at 15:55
  • Very apt :). I am hoping others would pitch in with their views, especially the long timers – beeshyams Jul 28 '17 at 16:01
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The section on detection via MAC address is blatantly wrong [...] Ideally this entire paragraph needs removing or at least considerably revising.

This is incorrect -- changing the fundamental meaning or intention of someone else's post is never allowed on Stack Exchange. If the post wasn't locked you could comment, downvote, or provide another answer.

  • Yes, but it's unfortunate that the answer was upvoted. It's still locked though, and therefore can't be downvoted to counter this, nor can a new answer be created that doesn't include this flaw. Presumably the same question can't be asked again either. – Adam Williams Aug 1 '17 at 9:31
  • In the specific case, though, is the post actually problematic? If it is both popular and wrong (and I've bolded "if" because I can't personally evaluate it) then we have a pretty gross situation. Kinda the opposite of "making the Internet a better place (through Q&A)" as the SE network is intended to do. Maybe deletion or some other solution would be preferable to locking? But again, I'm not an expert here. What is the story with that particular post? – Pops Aug 29 '17 at 14:53

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