My fiber optical modem broadcasts a poem via ethernet frame 0x8300
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
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.
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.
"How to kill child of parent with fork"
If anyone knows how the poem ended up in my modem, or even just what's ethertype 0x8300 all about, please comment!
Looks like ethertype 0x8300 is covered in this Chinese patent titled "Access-network looped network monitoring method" https://patents.google.com/patent/CN102263658B/en
Chinese version: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/f8/5e/8a9fcd4...
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_Protoco...
There are many more but I don't remember them off the top of my head. I probably need more coffee.
Configuration reference: http://huawei.communicationsmuseum.org.uk/MA5616/clireferenc...
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 PerlmanP.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-wou...
Could it be from the ISP-side devices?
So, my point being, given they also use this exact Nokia ONT, it could very well mean that it's compatible with Huawei because it IS, in part, Huawei.
Oracle uses this to connect SQL*Plus client to the database. This way, if you make a client without signing one their draconian contracts, they can sue you for infringing the copyrights on the poem.
This poem seems cute and memorable, and unlikely to offend any censors, and may have been available under a permissive license?
> 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://touch.facebook.com/e.h.thepoeticunderground/photos/a...
There is another mention of this earlier this year.
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.
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.
Relationships sometimes end in a sunk cost fallacy: you’ve spent so much time with someone, you think you have to fix the broken relationship at any cost, even if you’re the only one who’s still invested. And that leads to toxicity and being taken advantage of.
It does. Even last month (this ended in May--just 4 days after my birthday) I had a regression catching myself thinking about things. Usually little things. Stupid little things. Maybe I'd across something funny and thought briefly about sharing it with her only to realize that cutting off all communication is a one-way street. You can't go back. If you do, you risk opening those old wounds.
I know this isn't a popular place to say this, so I won't dwell on it, but what helped me immensely was getting back into church. Networking with other people whose compassion gave me an outlet was a tremendous relief.
I think that's the real key though: Having a support network is the most important keystone in paving a road to success after personal hurt. It's not easy, and you're right--it takes a lot of time. A dear friend whom I made through this told me, using his own experiences (he lost his son just 2 years ago) as a guide: You can get bitter or you can get better. It's a choice.
> you think you have to fix the broken relationship at any cost
This really hit home. Mine wasn't bad (or abusive), but even in spite of it, I felt exactly that way. If things went south for whatever reason, I wanted nothing more than to recover it back to the prior state. Love is hard, but the fear of losing that love is even harder.
Honestly, if I were smart, there were a number of red flags that should've been an indication I needed escape the situation. But, I wasn't. I fully accept that my choices were entirely stupid and motivated by the fact that I didn't want to hurt her. (It sounds ridiculous typing this out since I feel I'm just trying to rationalize it ex post facto, but it's how I felt at the time.)
> And that leads to toxicity and being taken advantage of.
...even if sometimes that "being taken advantage of" is strictly emotional!
I think what made it worse for me was that we were very close friends before the relationship started, and during it. Losing a romantic interest is one thing; losing someone who was your best friend for so long? That's much harder. The only way I could mentally rationalize it in the beginning was to pretend she passed away. In a strange series of mental gymnastics, I guess she did. She transformed into someone I didn't recognize (fancy title in front of her name; justified treating me differently), and that friend I had for so long honestly did die--at her own hands.
I know that as this post ages, there'll be others who stumble on it and wonder why the heck I typed all this out. Then there'll be those few who read our conversation here and realize that, yes!, things really do get better. It hurts. It sucks. You'll dwell on it for a while. But you can't dwell on it forever! For my part, a new gal has taken my interest from church, and I'm hoping to grow a new friendship just to see where the path leads. I was worried I wouldn't keep my heart open to such things; but, I realized that if I closed it off, I was letting that other person inflict harm on my future relationships. That's not fair to anyone, and it's giving a person who's no longer in my life far too much control that they don't deserve.
I'm going to cherish that poem. Ironically, I hadn't intended to browse HN tonight, then came across this headline.
Sorry about the lengthy post. Your comment really impacted me and made me take a moment to reflect on everything.
Thank you so much!
An HTTP header as a memorial.
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...
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.
And the Hackintosh equivalent was dsmos.kext. Which would "inject" the required system calls to trick OSX into running on non Apple hardware.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
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.
> "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.