15 ms·
My fiber optical modem broadcasts a poem via ethernet frame 0x8300
- doylecnn 6y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/32870553/telling-a-story-with-traceroute-how-does-it-work https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32870553/telling-a-story...
- perryizgr8 6y agoHuh! Maybe it is some sort of keepalive beacon. But why not use some normal standard way?
- yaris 6y agoMaybe it is some _copyrighted_ beacon? I've read somewhere that Oracle have made some verse a part of some network API of theirs to be able to copyright it.
- mschuster91 6y agoSomething in nature like "DontstealOSX" or whatever that SMBIOS string in Mac machines is called? In any case, doing this to an API is just plain nasty... but I believe at least under European law it's still getting trumped by the right to interoperability and reverse engineering.
- yardie 6y agoYou mean "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext." And the Hackintosh equivalent was dsmos.kext. Which would "inject" the required system calls to trick OSX into running on non Apple hardware.
- twoodfin 6y agoReminds me of the folklore.org[1] story about the Steve Jobs-requested, Susan Kare-designed bitmap embedded in the original Macintosh ROM to catch cloners. [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- ev1 6y agoThere's a "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)applecomputerinc" too.
- ezoe 6y agoThat strategy doesn't work in my country as the law clearly stated mere protocol is not copyrightable. Another interesting case was, Nintendo released a floppy disk with their logo relief and use its presence for DRM purpose. When third party released a compatible floppy disk, Nintendo sued them for trademark violation. Nintendo lost.
- 0xfaded 6y agoThe gameboy hashes the bitmap nintendo logo displayed by licensed cartridges at boot and compares it to a saved value.
- teraflop 6y agoThe original LEGO Mindstorms had a handshaking mechanism like this. The firmware for the RCX brick was stored in battery-backed RAM, so you had to re-upload it via infrared whenever you changed the batteries. But the ROM bootloader would only accept a firmware image if it contained the string: > "Do you byte, when I knock?" After uploading, the host computer would send an "unlock request" with the string "LEGO®", at which point the RCX would return the other half of the rhyme: > "Just a bit off the block!" I assume the only reason for jumping through these hoops was to have a legal excuse to discourage other companies from making interoperable products. I have no idea whether this strategy would have actually held up in court; in any case, there were plenty of homebrew tools that just embedded the magic strings anyway.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoNintendo did this with the GameBoy boot logo. It doesn't stand up in court.
- brokenmachine 6y agoAny links about the court case? I tried googling but it only came up with technical info about how it works.
- jaywalk 6y agoUnless I'm missing something, it appears to be going out on the customer-side Ethernet. So there's really nothing to keep alive on that side.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoIt's possible it dumps it out all interfaces.
- toast0 6y agoA lot of residential modems are also providing networking for IPTV set top boxes. This could be a keep alive for them (even if this particular provider doesn't offer that service).
- geoah 6y agoGoogle has a couple of versions that seem like a match. > The day I lost my very first tooth, > Was halfway through grade four, > I'd run my tongue along the gap, > Where my tooth had been before, > I remember I want home crying, > And showed it to my mum, > She told me that a brand new tooth, > Would grow up in my gum, > In a while the gap would stop feeling strange, > I wouldn't notice the tooth was gone, > The only reason I missed it now, > Was because it was there for so long, > Then slowly but surely over the weeks, > In the gap a new tooth grew, > And now it makes me wonder, > If people are like teeth too. https://www.wattpad.com/53876107-descend-teeth https://www.wattpad.com/53876107-descend-teeth
- geoah 6y agoOldest version I can find is by "thepoeticunderground" as an image from 2017. https://touch.facebook.com/e.h.thepoeticunderground/photos/a.1887095274895820/1957561121182568/?type=3&source=54 https://touch.facebook.com/e.h.thepoeticunderground/photos/a...
- geoah 6y agoI know I'm just talking to myself but I'm liking this rabbithole. There is another mention of this earlier this year. https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954?lang=en https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954?lang=e... > My ISP-provided optical modem broadcasts a poem line every 10 seconds to my local network from address 00:00:00:00:00:12 using ethertype 0x8300 frames. Anyone knows why? It's simultaneously amusing and scary.
- riobard 6y agoThat's also me. Still couldn't figure out the story behind this, so I'm posting to HN for help! :D
- riobard 6y agoI've traced the author to be Erin Hanson. Her other works can be found at https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/erin_hanson_2006_2.pdf https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/erin_hanson_2006_2.p...
- bzb6 6y agoCute and relatable for someone who was dumped recently. :P
- kuroguro 6y agoOhh... Thought it was about death.
- Zancarius 6y agoLikewise, albeit not quite so recently (~5 months ago). What's strange is how the poem relates to me somewhat differently being as that "gap" has already started to slowly fill. Honestly, it put a smile on my face. I love how little things like a simple poem can become so relatable to all of us. Regardless, I'm sorry to hear of your loss. Please do give yourself time to heal--I know it sounds cliché but it's absolutely of the utmost importance. Without knowing the context, it's almost certainly for the better. It took me a while to realize that toxic people can--and WILL--drag you down no matter how much you might love them or try to work things out. Plus side is that in my case, the problem solved itself once I stopped responding to her patterns of behavior that were causing us issues! If you need to let off some steam or just want someone anonymous to talk at, feel free to email me at my HN username at gmail.com. Having been down that road not all that long ago, I know how you feel.
- bzb6 6y ago
- daneel_w 6y agoThat's just under 5KB per minute, or about 200MB per month. Odd.
- api 6y agoIts on your local LAN, so that's nothing.
- londons_explore 6y agoMore importantly, it might cause some devices to wake their network hardware or even CPU's up every 10 seconds, and significantly shorten battery life.
- dn3500 6y agoA device that wakes on broadcast packets of an unknown type would be very poorly designed and wouldn't get much sleep on any network. Wake-on-LAN usually only wakes up when it receives a magic packet, or possibly if it it receives a packet addressed specifically to that device (not broadcast).
- londons_explore 6y agoMy 'home' network (with 10 people, 70 unique devices last month), there are currently only about 15 broadcast packets per minute, and they're all things that could be filtered/handled in wifi firmware (DHCP requests, multicast management traffic, STP stuff, ARP discovers, etc.). If other networks are like mine, then it would be reasonable for firmware to wake up for any unhandled thing, since the application processor might need to handle that unknown message, and to not wake up would leave the application developer sad...
- client4 6y agoI always thought it would be a unique method of prayer (for an existing or new religion) that used part of the IPv6 packet header or an ICMP packet. We would be sending prayers at random with a ttyl to be broadcast across existing networks, and routers/endpoints could choose to listen.
- mfashby 6y agoReminds me of this one: https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terr... An HTTP header as a memorial.
- gigatexal 6y agoWhy would an ISP do this? Is this some kind of developer Easter egg or some sort of way to track the customer?
- tifan 6y agoAh, this is used for loop detection by Huawei CPE. Configuration reference: http://huawei.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/MA5616/clireference/MA5616%20V800R312C00%20Command%20Reference%2011.chm/cmd/ring_check_private-ethtype.html http://huawei.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/MA5616/clireferenc...
- justinsaccount 6y agoWould have been more fitting to use Algorhyme I think that I shall never see A graph more lovely than a tree. A tree whose crucial property Is loop-free connectivity. A tree that must be sure to span So packets can reach every LAN. First, the root must be selected. By ID, it is elected. Least-cost paths from root are traced. In the tree, these paths are placed. A mesh is made by folks like me, Then bridges find a spanning tree. -Radia Perlman
- greenyoda 6y agoThe author of this poem is actually the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol (which the poem describes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman P.S. For those who like nerdy poems, here's a poem which is a proof of the undecidability of the Halting Problem: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/19/how-dr-suess-would-prove-the-halting-problem-undecidable http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/19/how-dr-suess-wou...
- seattletech 6y agohttps://teachinglondoncomputing.org/poetry/ https://teachinglondoncomputing.org/poetry/
- riobard 6y agoBut the modem is not made by Huawei. Its model number is G-140W-UD and it's made by Shanghai Nokia-Bell Co.,Ltd. Could it be from the ISP-side devices?
- 6y ago
- riobard 6y agoI'm the owner of the modem. I've found about this a couple of months back when I moved the modem to its own vlan and noticed the broadcast frames. I did some research into the author of the poem on Twitter (https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954 https://twitter.com/riojot/status/1268821579724541954), but nothing fruitful. If anyone knows how the poem ended up in my modem, or even just what's ethertype 0x8300 all about, please comment!
- tifan 6y agoSee my comment below :)
- Randor 6y agoHmmmm, Looks like ethertype 0x8300 is covered in this Chinese patent titled "Access-network looped network monitoring method" https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102263658B/en https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102263658B/en Chinese version: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/f8/5e/8a9fcd4b702191/CN102263658B.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/f8/5e/8a9fcd4...
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoThe type 8300 is not a registered standard and the patent includes a payload description: "mac, port-info, vlan-info" (yes some is redundant to the headers, that is explicitly mentioned) and that doesn't fit the data. Maybe "Huawei compatible" in the meaning of "can be understood by their devices, but not exactly as patented by them". If a ring with a second such device is formed, it might respond with a different poem.
- Randor 6y agoYeah, There are dozens of ether-types that are not standardized. There is also 0x8899 which is Realtek Remote Control Protocol (RRCP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek_Remote_Control_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek_Remote_Control_Protoco... There are many more but I don't remember them off the top of my head. I probably need more coffee.
- bityard 6y agoThis story is slightly munged due to my own faulty memory and to obfuscate the guilty parties... The company I work for develops network appliances for large backbone and provider networks. One of the things these appliances do is maintain a "hearbeat" with each other so that if one disappears, the others know about it and can send an alert to the NOC. The heartbeat packets themselves needed some kind of payload, even though the payload was not important. At that time, the company was still a small and scrappy startup so humor was generally encouraged. So naturally the engineer decided the payload should be a random line from a list of pirate quotes. Ship-its all around and the feature made it into the next major product release. A couple months later, a very angry call comes into the helpdesk from someone _very_ high up in the food chain of a major U.S. telecom. It turns out they had noticed the pirate quotes in a random packet dump they were looking at and the network team spent a whole weekend thinking their network was very deeply compromised because our appliances were one of the tools they were using to inspect the network and kept seeing the "Yarr, Matey!" and such everywhere they looked. Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers.
- geoah 6y agoAmazing story, thanks for sharing it. Any chance the pirate quotes got replaces with a random poem on the internet in this story? :D
- whalesalad 6y ago> Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers. It's like the engineer picked the literal worst possible thing to send over the wire. Like making an alarm clock for people who have wartime PTSD that fires off a 9mm round to wake you up. More startups need to be cognizant of this. Humor is important but there is a balance between fun and idiotic.
- Cerium 6y agoAt work we have a test for these things: "If you would be uncomfortable explaining something to an auditor or judge, don't include it in the product." I think it is a good test because there are many in-jokes and engineering terms that don't sound good to laypeople.
- eznzt 6y agoCan someone translate the filter used in that tcpdump command to wireshark syntax?
- parliament32 6y agoeth.type == 0x8300
- yarosv 6y agoIsn't it copyright infringement?