2 ms·

You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsen

by pvg 5y ago

You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsensical after the first cursory glance. That's a very... ineffective way to assess plausibility.

Dylan16807 5y ago
What parts are implausible? The port is obviously fine. Lan communication between rokus makes sense. And it might have updates or other things, but it's just a reboot so that doesn't even matter. "exact same bytes" sounds harder than it is. Then a silly probability joke. And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences. It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
- pvg 5y ago
  Most of it is implausible. Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no. Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked. Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical. We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks. Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.

2 ms·

You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsen

by pvg 5y ago

Dylan16807 5y ago
What parts are implausible? The port is obviously fine. Lan communication between rokus makes sense. And it might have updates or other things, but it's just a reboot so that doesn't even matter. "exact same bytes" sounds harder than it is. Then a silly probability joke. And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences. It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
- pvg 5y ago
  Most of it is implausible. Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no. Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked. Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical. We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks. Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.