7 ms·

Playing battleships over BGP

352 points by benjojo12 8y ago

z3t4 8y ago
Need to come up with a good reason to register a ASN so I can play too
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Love it. But I like the skrillex steganography even more! https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-drops https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-d...
- twic 8y ago
  > But that had me thinking, how much effort would it be to actually embed machine readable data inside a dubstep track The Aphex Twin actually did this in 1999: https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizing-the-sound-spectrum/ https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizi... As did a few other people around that time - there was even software for it. > while ensuring that the sound could be enjoyed by humans as well… Ah, well now that is arguably something that the Aphex Twin didn't do.
  - bfhd 8y ago
    The same trick was used in the soundtrack of the new Doom game: http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-soundtrack-spectrogram/ http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-sound...
empath75 8y ago
> The game went smoothly, apart from a 45 minute period where no moves were exchanged due to causing the previously mentioned route flap damping to activate. This happened on my side and caused Level 3 to have a less optimal route for my traffic in the 45 minute period. To mitigate this from happening again later on the game, we decided to move to a 90 second cooldown period on every move. Must have been an interesting support call.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  I can't even imagine taking the call from the business people why we were basically off the internet for 45 minutes, and or severely degraded..
  - jauer 8y ago
    Only way they'd be offline or severely degraded is if this was a shit network that was only connected to (3).
    - scruffyherder 8y ago
      Level 3? Yeah it's shit. And by causing the routes to be dampened, yeah great thing to do with a production network.
mino 8y ago
Found your tweets weeks ago by accident and started following you. Man, you must start giving nerd standup comedy talks at CCC/RIPE/ARIN/etc!!
pavel_lishin 8y ago
If this looks familiar, it's probably because you've recently read Ben's post about making art from SSH key randomart: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-work-art https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-wo...
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I can't be the only one who was annoyed because the game is "Battleship", not "Battleships". I can see using the plural to describe the game generically, but he also uses the name capitalized, which is just wrong. Nevertheless, it was an interesting article. It's always cool when someone totally subverts the purpose of something to do something entirely different.
- dgritsko 8y ago
  The game is much older than Milton Bradley's version (which I assume you're referring to) and has gone by several different names - including "Battleships". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)#History
- stordoff 8y ago
  It's entirely possible the author is more familiar with a version that _does_ call it "Battleships", such as the 1987 video game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleships_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleships_(video_game) Also FWIW I only ever hear it referred to as "Battleships" in the UK (even though most versions are called "Battleship"), and the Amazon search suggestions suggest this is common (https://i.imgur.com/WlZhNxg.png https://i.imgur.com/WlZhNxg.png), so the mistake is hardly surprising.
- iDemonix 8y ago
  I was only annoyed by 'interger' in one of the diagrams, but other than that a great article - I'll admit I didn't know the proper title of the game!
mey 8y ago
I am amazed about the hilarious design and concept. Horrified that this was done with links running production data.
- progval 8y ago
  No experiment is worth doing without your production system at stake
  - mey 8y ago
    Typically move fast and break things refers to improving a product, not the next move in battleship.
    - iDemonix 8y ago
      I think it's open to interpretation.
    - jauer 8y ago
      You don't actually know if something works until you've tested in prod. Adding some community tags to BGP announcements is really trivial and mostly harmless.
- tscs37 8y ago
  Considering the modern role of BGP it's probably a bit like playing battleship on the controls of two nuclear power plants using the power grid.
  - d0mine 8y ago
    As I understand it, generator turbines are synchronized in a region and therefore one can exchange info by modulating the frequency (on the opposite side, on a small scale, there is probably a product on the consumer side: network-over-a-power-plug). https://preview.entsoe.eu/news/2018/03/06/press-release-continuing-frequency-deviation-in-the-continental-european-power-system-originating-in-serbia-kosovo-political-solution-urgently-needed-in-addition-to-technical/ https://preview.entsoe.eu/news/2018/03/06/press-release-cont... https://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-network.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-network.htm
ademarre 8y ago
I love Battleship hacks. The game begs to be implemented everywhere for its simplicity. Before I learned to program I implemented it in MS Excel circa 2002. It was played over a local network as a shared file, and it relied on manual polling (file reload) and honor (don't peek at your opponent's worksheet). I played it with a coworker during breaks in an environment that IT had locked down, but they didn't block Excel.
- overcast 8y ago
  Meh. Wake me up when Doom gets ported to BGP.
  - Bjartr 8y ago
    I don't know about that, but I do know it has been ported to Excel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394828
- ComodoHacker 8y ago
  >in an environment that IT had locked down When I worked in one such environment people made and enjoyed HTA chat app which used text file on a corporate file share as its storage.
  - gh02t 8y ago
    I remember me and a friend figuring out how to use `net send` to send messages in my middle school typing class. They had everything so locked down, but they allowed command prompt for some reason. We felt so accomplished.
xingped 8y ago
Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning more about and playing with BGP?
- iDemonix 8y ago
  You can setup a decent lab with GNS3.
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    Why bother with a lab, I want a company that'll let me mess up their traffic, and an ISP that'll not block me for doing so.
- znedw 8y ago
  A nice introduction to BGP is Peter Hessler's BGP-spamd (https://bgp-spamd.net https://bgp-spamd.net), which is a creative use of BGP for sync'ing lists of blacklisted mail servers.
- b101010 8y ago
  Have a look at dn42. https://dn42.net/Home https://dn42.net/Home
iDemonix 8y ago
I work for an ISP and have done a fair bit of work on the peering side of things - it's amazing how many peers have no/few filters on their side, and/or refuse to use an MD5 password.
an_account_name 8y ago
> Since we were both supporting real production traffic through the prefixes we were using to play the game Annnnd fired
- jauer 8y ago
  Naah. :) Network engineers that can do this are pretty rare and their managers are usually quite chill. See also: the BGPNyaa cat: https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=as15562&w.starttime=2017-01-15T00%3A00%3A00&w.endtime=2017-06-23T00%3A00%3A00&show=Maxmized https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=as15...
samgranieri 8y ago
This is _insane_. Wow.

352 points by benjojo12 8y ago

z3t4 8y ago

Need to come up with a good reason to register a ASN so I can play too

Love it. But I like the skrillex steganography even more! https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-drops https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-d...

twic 8y ago
> But that had me thinking, how much effort would it be to actually embed machine readable data inside a dubstep track The Aphex Twin actually did this in 1999: https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizing-the-sound-spectrum/ https://www.magneticmag.com/2012/08/the-aphex-face-visualizi... As did a few other people around that time - there was even software for it. > while ensuring that the sound could be enjoyed by humans as well… Ah, well now that is arguably something that the Aphex Twin didn't do.
- bfhd 8y ago
  The same trick was used in the soundtrack of the new Doom game: http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-soundtrack-spectrogram/ http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-sound...

empath75 8y ago

> The game went smoothly, apart from a 45 minute period where no moves were exchanged due to causing the previously mentioned route flap damping to activate. This happened on my side and caused Level 3 to have a less optimal route for my traffic in the 45 minute period. To mitigate this from happening again later on the game, we decided to move to a 90 second cooldown period on every move. Must have been an interesting support call.

scruffyherder 8y ago
I can't even imagine taking the call from the business people why we were basically off the internet for 45 minutes, and or severely degraded..
- jauer 8y ago
  Only way they'd be offline or severely degraded is if this was a shit network that was only connected to (3).
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    Level 3? Yeah it's shit. And by causing the routes to be dampened, yeah great thing to do with a production network.

mino 8y ago

Found your tweets weeks ago by accident and started following you. Man, you must start giving nerd standup comedy talks at CCC/RIPE/ARIN/etc!!

pavel_lishin 8y ago

If this looks familiar, it's probably because you've recently read Ben's post about making art from SSH key randomart: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-work-art https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-wo...

ConceptJunkie 8y ago

I can't be the only one who was annoyed because the game is "Battleship", not "Battleships". I can see using the plural to describe the game generically, but he also uses the name capitalized, which is just wrong. Nevertheless, it was an interesting article. It's always cool when someone totally subverts the purpose of something to do something entirely different.

dgritsko 8y ago
The game is much older than Milton Bradley's version (which I assume you're referring to) and has gone by several different names - including "Battleships". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)#History
stordoff 8y ago
It's entirely possible the author is more familiar with a version that _does_ call it "Battleships", such as the 1987 video game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleships_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleships_(video_game) Also FWIW I only ever hear it referred to as "Battleships" in the UK (even though most versions are called "Battleship"), and the Amazon search suggestions suggest this is common (https://i.imgur.com/WlZhNxg.png https://i.imgur.com/WlZhNxg.png), so the mistake is hardly surprising.
iDemonix 8y ago
I was only annoyed by 'interger' in one of the diagrams, but other than that a great article - I'll admit I didn't know the proper title of the game!

mey 8y ago

I am amazed about the hilarious design and concept. Horrified that this was done with links running production data.

progval 8y ago
No experiment is worth doing without your production system at stake
- mey 8y ago
  Typically move fast and break things refers to improving a product, not the next move in battleship.
  - iDemonix 8y ago
    I think it's open to interpretation.
  - jauer 8y ago
    You don't actually know if something works until you've tested in prod. Adding some community tags to BGP announcements is really trivial and mostly harmless.
tscs37 8y ago
Considering the modern role of BGP it's probably a bit like playing battleship on the controls of two nuclear power plants using the power grid.
- d0mine 8y ago
  As I understand it, generator turbines are synchronized in a region and therefore one can exchange info by modulating the frequency (on the opposite side, on a small scale, there is probably a product on the consumer side: network-over-a-power-plug). https://preview.entsoe.eu/news/2018/03/06/press-release-continuing-frequency-deviation-in-the-continental-european-power-system-originating-in-serbia-kosovo-political-solution-urgently-needed-in-addition-to-technical/ https://preview.entsoe.eu/news/2018/03/06/press-release-cont... https://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-network.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-network.htm

ademarre 8y ago

I love Battleship hacks. The game begs to be implemented everywhere for its simplicity. Before I learned to program I implemented it in MS Excel circa 2002. It was played over a local network as a shared file, and it relied on manual polling (file reload) and honor (don't peek at your opponent's worksheet). I played it with a coworker during breaks in an environment that IT had locked down, but they didn't block Excel.

overcast 8y ago
Meh. Wake me up when Doom gets ported to BGP.
- Bjartr 8y ago
  I don't know about that, but I do know it has been ported to Excel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394828
ComodoHacker 8y ago
>in an environment that IT had locked down When I worked in one such environment people made and enjoyed HTA chat app which used text file on a corporate file share as its storage.
- gh02t 8y ago
  I remember me and a friend figuring out how to use `net send` to send messages in my middle school typing class. They had everything so locked down, but they allowed command prompt for some reason. We felt so accomplished.

xingped 8y ago

Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning more about and playing with BGP?

iDemonix 8y ago
You can setup a decent lab with GNS3.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  Why bother with a lab, I want a company that'll let me mess up their traffic, and an ISP that'll not block me for doing so.
znedw 8y ago
A nice introduction to BGP is Peter Hessler's BGP-spamd (https://bgp-spamd.net https://bgp-spamd.net), which is a creative use of BGP for sync'ing lists of blacklisted mail servers.
b101010 8y ago
Have a look at dn42. https://dn42.net/Home https://dn42.net/Home

iDemonix 8y ago

I work for an ISP and have done a fair bit of work on the peering side of things - it's amazing how many peers have no/few filters on their side, and/or refuse to use an MD5 password.

an_account_name 8y ago

> Since we were both supporting real production traffic through the prefixes we were using to play the game Annnnd fired

jauer 8y ago
Naah. :) Network engineers that can do this are pretty rare and their managers are usually quite chill. See also: the BGPNyaa cat: https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=as15562&w.starttime=2017-01-15T00%3A00%3A00&w.endtime=2017-06-23T00%3A00%3A00&show=Maxmized https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history#w.resource=as15...

samgranieri 8y ago

This is _insane_. Wow.