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How can I disable my PC or any device attached to a network from broadcasting or revealing its name? For example, if you are connected to a router and look at the list of attached devices, it will show the name of the device.

Which protocol is this revealed or broadcast via, and is there a way to disable or block it?

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That table is the DHCP lease table. – MaQleod May 21 '11 at 22:46
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I'm curious as to why you want to disable this, because I'm pretty sure it's for a bad reason (i.e. you are trying to do something that you should do some other way). Even if you disable broadcasting of your computer's name, it will still be discoverable by it's IP address, this is necessary for the network to function. – jcrawfordor May 22 '11 at 0:39
jcrawfordor, basically not all devices have hostnames, I would like to mimic not having a hostname as much as possible. – Sonny Ordell May 22 '11 at 22:09
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  1. Disable NetBIOS in the options of the device.

  2. Disable DHCP and go Static instead or set your DHCP client not to set a host name with its request.

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On a Windows machine NetBIOS is needed, is it not? How on Windows can you tell the DHCP client not to set a host name? – Sonny Ordell May 21 '11 at 23:17
If it's not possible, disable it instead and go Static. As the host name is needed by the router for handling the DHCP request and the best you could do is try to let it send a blank one using the registry, which I would consider a bad thing to do. – Tom Wijsman May 21 '11 at 23:23
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NetBIOS (which is referred to as Windows Networking) is not necessary for Windows to function, just for you to use Windows network services (SMB network file access and printing, mostly). You can disable File & Printer Sharing or something similarly worded in Windows, and I think this will stop it from broadcasting a NetBIOS identity. – jcrawfordor May 22 '11 at 0:38
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@jcrawfordor: NetBIOS is not necessary for file sharing to work. Starting with XP, Windows can use "raw" SMB over TCP, with DNS for name resolution. (Home routers often provide the latter.) – grawity May 22 '11 at 13:54
Tom, how can the hostname be required for handling DHCP when some devices don't have hostnames? – Sonny Ordell May 22 '11 at 22:09
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