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Who gave it such a ridiculous name? Trust Fowler to take something that's been around for thirty years and give it a name that doesn't invoke any sense of what
by retrogradeorbit 9y ago
Who gave it such a ridiculous name? Trust Fowler to take something that's been around for thirty years and give it a name that doesn't invoke any sense of what it actually is.
This has been around since at least the 90s, but back then it was called port knocking. I remember seeing an implementation in the 90s that required different ICMP echo packet sizes (say 56, 64, 64, then 56 bytes) sent in order for the system to unfirewall a particular service port for that incoming IP.
- loopbit 9y agoAlthough I kind of share your anger at giving weird names to stuff that's been there for decades[0], port knocking could be considered as just one specific case of this pattern and not the general case. What if we don't use different ports? Your example uses ICMP packages with different sizes, not ports. What if you use something at the application layer that doesn't require ports, maybe a sequence of (invalid) calls to separate end-points? Personally, I don't care how it's called as long as everyone agrees on what it is and here, again, I agree with you in that "Gothic Hotel" might not be the best name. [0] Just the other day I heard a plain-old FTP server described as "cloud-based storage service".
- eggy 9y agoAgree on the naming bit. Haskell - named after a famous logician; LISP - LISt Processor; APL - A Programming Language...Fortran, Ada, all have sensible names, or easy to reason about or guess. Now, 'kitten', Rust, Lua, Joy, Python, well, I like them, but you get the point. Don't even mention startup company names!