Playing battleships over BGP | Hacker News Reader

Playing battleships over BGP

blog.benjojo.co.uk

352 pointsbenjojo1237 comments

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.

Meh. Wake me up when Doom gets ported to BGP.

I don't know about that, but I do know it has been ported to Excel

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394828

>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.

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.

> 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.

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..

Only way they'd be offline or severely degraded is if this was a shit network that was only connected to (3).

Level 3? Yeah it's shit. And by causing the routes to be dampened, yeah great thing to do with a production network.

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

> 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-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.

The same trick was used in the soundtrack of the new Doom game: http://www.factmag.com/2016/05/30/doom-game-pentagrams-sound...

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!!

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-wo...

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.

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

Annnnd fired

Naah. :) Network engineers that can do this are pretty rare and their managers are usually quite chill.

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

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

No experiment is worth doing without your production system at stake

Typically move fast and break things refers to improving a product, not the next move in battleship.

I think it's open to interpretation.

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.

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.

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-cont...

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-network.htm

Indeed. The responsible way to do this would've been using either off-network routers with non-real AS numbers, or even virtual ones in something like Cisco Packet Tracer.

If your production systems break when some third-party plays battleship on them, you might want to invest in better production systems.

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

You can setup a decent lab with GNS3.

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.

A nice introduction to BGP is Peter Hessler's BGP-spamd (https://bgp-spamd.net), which is a creative use of BGP for sync'ing lists of blacklisted mail servers.

Have a look at dn42.

https://dn42.net/Home

This is _insane_. Wow.

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.

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

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)

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), so the mistake is hardly surprising.

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!

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