The below articles describes techniques that can identifiy hardware via the internet by exploiting deviations in hardware clock timing.

Mainstream Media Release:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9183346,00.htm

Technical Paper:
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers...ingerprinting/

Very interesting paper...This fingerprinting seemed to be OS independant.

F1fan